#pls tell me !!!! so curious | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

revasserium · 2 years ago

Note

neverending daydreams with kenma? 🫶

reqs are open :)

neverending daydreams

kenma; 3,709 words; almost freakishly fluffy, but also kinda trippy. basically my specialty and i love this fic a holy freaking hell of a lot. if u read pls PLS tell me what u think u__u and lemme know if u 'get' the ending!!!

he has never been, in all seriousness, what people would have called a dreamer. but having spent most of his waking hours either gaming or wishing he were gaming, kenma quietly considers the implications of being called as such. a dreamer. what a title — what a name.

what a burden.

“was it bad last night?”

“no, not as bad… but at least it was interesting.”

“oh yeah? tell me.”

“so there was a maze, right — and then you know the super hot manga character from the new series — yeah, he was there too, and we had to like figure out this maze but we couldn’t wear shoes —”

kenma lets his head lilt to one side, his eyes falling shut in the early afternoon sun filtering through the wide classroom windows. they’d been cracked open half an hour ago to let in some air, the spring blossoming into what kenma is already sure would be an absolutely sweltering tokyo summer. he’s already dreading it.

“— and then i woke up!”

“aww… lame! you didn’t even make out!”

your laughter spills across the room, warm as the sun now soaking into kenma’s skin and he shakes himself awake, blinking unfocused towards the gaggle of girls sitting three rows ahead of him, heads bent together, a multi-limbed conglomeration of painted nails and hair pins, phone baubles and perfume. he shudders slightly — making out — what a thought. how gross. he’d never understood the appeal, even as more and more of his classmates began to whisper about it, to joke and cackle about it next to the shoe-lockers, in the stalls of the boys bathrooms during lunch, on the benches near the playparks on the way home, loitering around convenience store corners, eyes lingering on bare skin and bracelets, on rolled up sleeves and blushing cheeks.

kenma crinkles his nose, thinking now, of noses. and where on earth they’d even go if you were to —

“oi kenma-kun, do you have notes from yesterday’s class? i lent mine to kiyo in 2-b and she says her dog ate it.”

kenma blinks, nonplussed as your face swims into view, his vision catching on the tiny gems glinting from your earlobes.

“huh? you… don’t really believe that, do you?” he asks before he can quite stop himself. the resulting silence makes an uncomfortable heat climb up the length of his neck till his cheeks are burning with it, and still, you stare at him.

“why shouldn’t i? her dog eats weird stuff all the time.”

kenma blinks again, owlish, and he’s unsure if your confusion is feigned and this entire thing is just some elaborate prank, one that’ll break you into laughter any second. he resists the urge to look around, to make sure that the rest of his classmates aren’t all watching him like they’re in on the joke, waiting for the cue to start laughing as well. he feels his shoulders shrugging up as he fights down a frown.

“yeah but… that’s like the oldest excuse in the book, isn’t it? my dog ate my homework?”

this time, its your turn to blink, cocking your head to one side as you regard him, not a hint of malice or trickery in sight. he feels almost ashamed of himself for thinking it of you. of course you wouldn’t.

and then, you laugh. and he starts again, not because this was what he’d been afraid of but because this is the exact kind of laughter he was not expecting, pure and unhurried and unabashedly happy.

“ah — i guess you’re right, but… well, if she wants to keep my notes, then that’s fine. i’ll just make another set. so…” you smile at him, bright as dawn and summer starlight, “can i borrow your notes from yesterday?”

kenma resists the urge to groan, because his mind is already racing into overdrive — why not just ask kiyo from 2-b to give you back your notes again? nay, to demand that she give it back? to threaten her dog with… with what yet, kenma isn’t sure, but he is sure that that would be simpler, would it not, than to ask him for his notes. even though, sure, yes — he has almost all the same classes as you and sure, yes — he does also take pretty good notes. and sure, yes — fine.

this might be the path of least resistance but… doesn’t it feel a bit like punching in the cheatcode? isn’t it stunting… character growth and exp gain for both you and kiyo in 2-b? what if this causes a glitch in the matrix and you’re stuck in the eternal loop of borrowing people’s notes only to have your own notes be taken and eaten by kiyo’s homework-devouring dog until no one in school has notes anymore and everyone fails? would everyone have to hard-reset and start the year over?

“uh… sure… i guess. if you promise to give it back.” he reaches into his bag to pull out his notebook, pressing his lips for a second before handing it over.

you make a noise that’s caught between a squeal and a squeak. it’s a happy sound, he’s sure.

“thank you, thank you, thank you! and yes, i promise i’ll give it back! and my dog doesn’t eat homework — only table scraps and puppy treats — and maybe the occasional piece of trash on the sidewalk, but definitely no homework!”

you press the notes to your chest and beam at him and kenma finally lets out a soul-shaking sigh. he wishes he were home; he wishes he were playing video games; he wishes that the day came with a fast-forward button so he didn’t have to deal with all these scenarios that don’t make a lick of human sense.

the next day, when you return his notes, it’s with a shy smile and that he isn’t entirely sure what to make of. you’d licked your lips and looked anywhere but at him before pressing the notebook back into his chest and scurrying off with a thankssomuchforyournotes! tossed over your shoulder before you’re disappearing into your multi-limbed girl-gaggle and they were all laughing and giggling as they absorb you back into their amorphous blob, casting furtive glances his way that make his shoulders want to shrink up to his ears, if only to hide his face behind.

he hunkers down over his notebook, adjusts his sports bag and hurries into homeroom.

it isn’t until japanese literature, when he’s flipping open said borrowed-and-now-returned notebook that he notices — there’s a drawing on next blank page. or, well, what used to be the next blank page but is now definitely no longer blank. and it’s a drawing of you.

kenma stares down at it, at the cartoonishly large head, the huge, anime-lashed eyes, at your chibi-rendered hands clasped together in an unmistakable gesture of thanks. and something inside him jumps. something warm and thumping and uncoordinated. it coughs, skips, skids inside his chest and it takes him a moment to realize that it’s his heart.

thanks again! let me treat you to lunch sometime?

he reads the line four times before he finally manages to process the words. lunch. sometime.

treat?

he frowns. but school lunches are always free.

his eyes slingshot towards you, drawn as if by a magnetic force, and he finds you immediately. your eyes meet and a zing sings through him, shaking him from the top of his head to the tips of his toes. your cheeks flush, but you don’t look away. instead, you cock your head as if asking a question.

his heart thumps, and then thumps again. heat slowly unfurls in the base of his stomach, something like hunger, except it isn’t actually hunger. it’s a wanting, a thrumming wish — pressing and feverish and — he swallows hard, tearing his eyes away from you to look back down at the drawing, at the words.

treat. lunch. sometime.

sometime. but it can’t be during school. then when?

kenma freezes as realization washes through him, cold as a too-large bite of icecream.

oh. oh.

and then, he blushes hard enough for him to bury his face in his arms, refusing to pick his head up even when the literature teacher asks him expressly if he were feeling ill.

it’s saturday at noon, to be precise. and as kenma waits outside the neighborhood soba house, he wonders briefly if he’d accidentally stumbled upon a hidden side-quest that’s actually more difficult than the main storyline, because he’s almost certain that he’d never signed up for this.

cold-soba with you. alone. together.

no. he scuffs his feet against the floor, his fingers furling and unfurling in his pockets, so unaccustomed to not having a game console to fiddle with, no controllers to twiddle. he feels it like a phantom itch, like ghost-controllers as he opts for chewing on his lower lip instead.

stupid kuroo, taking away his switch. stupid, stupid, genius kuroo, letting it “slip” that kenma had a date on saturday, so that his mother had fussed all morning and had subjected him to a full-body pat down to confiscated the rest of his ill-hidden hand-held gaming consoles one by one with a scowl and a reprimand of no gaming when you’re on your first real date, kozume!

at least, he thinks, tugging his phone out of his pocket to flip through the preinstalled games there, there’s alway snake —

“kenma-kun! hi! sorry i’m late!”

your voice catches him like a punch in the stomach and he almost drops his phone, fumbling it for a second before catching it and shoving it into his pocket.

he looks up, a frown already forming on his forehead when he stops — he catches sight of you and that strange, twisting not-hunger-hunger gnaws at a growing space inside him. because oh — there you are. you’re standing in front of him, a little breathless, but dressed like… like a display from a pastry store window, or one of those ball-jointed dolls that have entire fan-followings online. you’re lashes and lace, earrings and nail-art, and all the normal things he’d come to associate with the strange, foreign concept of girl-geometry but you’re also nervous, and sweet, and looking up at him with those huge eyes, not unlike those in the chibi-doodle version of yourself that you’d left in his notebook.

and nervousness he understands. sweetness… he understands too. to a certain degree.

“no, you’re fine… i just got here too,” he says, and it’s a not-really-lie, because he did just get here… like fifteen minutes ago. but time’s just a human construct anyway, and there’s no point in getting caught up in the semantics.

he takes a breath at the same time you do, and you break into a fit of nervous laughter that makes him want to reach out and bottle the sound. or maybe just to record it on his phone for a rainy day. he tamps down the strange and doubtlessly creepy urge with a cough and motions vaguely towards the door.

“uh — you wanna…”

you nod, a bit too hard, before brushing by him into the soba shop and bowing to the middle-aged woman behind the counter.

she seats the pair of you in a booth, tucked into the corner, and for this kenma is thankful. he feels himself relaxing into the secludedness of the position.

“hot?” he asks, watching as you fan yourself with your hand from across the table.

you freeze and blush again, and he looks down immediately, feeling rather guilty for putting you on the spot. but when he glances back at you, you’re smiling.

“yeah, a little. it’s gonna be so gross this summer.”

“yeah, i know. i hate it already.”

he would’ve winced if it hadn’t been cut off by the sound of your laughter. with this, at least, he is familiar. how many times had he let himself melt into that sound during all those classes you had together? how many times had he centered himself around it, made it the still point of his turning universe, grounded himself to it so he could count from one moment to the next. he hadn’t thought it anything strange before now — after all, isn’t that what the internet says you’re supposed to do when you’re feeling unmoored? to find a commonality and stake yourself to it. only…

is it strange that he’d chosen your laughter?

it’d been such a simple choice, so easy to make — it was everywhere, and when it wasn’t there, he could conjure up the sound perfectly.

sitting across from you now, he pauses, wondering what kuroo would say if he were ever to bring this up. probably call him a pervert and never let him live it down.

“me too. i think i hate a lot of things but…” you break off, your eyes meeting his for a split second before looking away.

kenma breathes, watches the way you worry your bottom lip.

the conversation is stilted, but after a while, the awkwardness wears off. like silver soaking off years of accumulated tarnish, the shine breaking through as the soba is served and the pair of you are left slurping at the chilled noodles.

by the time he offers to walk you home, kenma finds that he’s no longer searching for things to do with his fingers, the phantom itch of a ghost-console no longer needed to occupy the space between his hands. and when you say goodbye to him this time, it’s no longer a string of words strung together too fast, tossed like an endless hope over your shoulder, but held between the pair of your bodies like a promise.

“see you on monday!”

kenma smiles, “yeah… sure. see you then.”

he watches as you turn to walk away, and his feet warm with the premonition of motion, but something holds him still, holds him there as he watches you take two steps, three steps — and then, you turn back around. and you’re closing the space between you and him, quick as a flash, your lips grazing the skin of his cheek, and then just as quickly, you’re falling back onto your just-taken steps, your cheeks ablaze as you wave a hand at him and race off before he can do more than open his mouth, his jaw loosened by the action, the thought — the motion and e-motion of it all.

kenma stares at the place where your body had just been, taking up space, and then oh-so-abruptly… not.

you’d turned the corner, and now not even your shadow lingers, but he fancies that there’s still a break in the light, a tear in the air just in front of him where you had been, warmed by your just-there-ness. slowly, he raises a hand to swipe it through that space, before bringing it up to his cheek to brush it against the place where your lips had been.

and are now no longer.

and there too, he feels his own skin, warmed by the just-there-ness of your no-longer-there lips.

three days, it takes him. three days to build up the courage to ask you out again. on another date. and this time, he doesn’t tell kuroo, or his mother, but he doesn’t bring games with him either.

the frozen yogurt place isn’t too crowded on a wednesday night, early enough to still be dinner-time, too late for the afternoon-stragglers to be out and about. he arrives, as he had done, fifteen minutes before you, and he wastes no time in starting a game of snake on his phone.

by the time you get there, it’s getting hard to maneuver the pixel-snake’s body without it’s tail trailing across the entire screen.

“i thought you’d only be into the kind of games with like… a million levels or something.”

your voice jolts him out of his intense concentration, and this time, he does drop his phone. your reach out to catch it with a knowing grin, handing it back to him, but by then, the large GAME OVER is already flashing over the screen.

“oops… sorry,” you say, looking genuinely apologetic.

“don’t be. and you’re right, i do like games with a ton of levels but… things like this are fun once in a while too.”

he blushes as he motions at the space between the pair of you, his phone still clutched in his hand, so that it’s unclear if he’s talking about the game or… something else entirely.

“only once in a while?” you venture, the slightest hint of a tease in your voice. and it’s incredible, he thinks, the change a single week’s worth of familiarity can do for the both of you. because while your first “date” had been all awkward silences and rough, stumbling changes of topic, this one — already — has taken on a sheen of smoothness and liquidity that makes kenma’s skin prickle up with what he can only assume is excitement.

“well… maybe — i dunno…” he gulps as he holds open the door for you to walk into the yogurt store, “it’s only a pattern if something happens more than three times, right?”

and god, where had this come from? this daring, this strange, almost alternate-universe confidence — and is he really flirting?

you let out a pleased sort of hum that warms his entire body and he thinks that he’d rather like to hear that sound again too. to add to his collection of bottle-able sounds that come from your body — he bites off the thought there, because kuroo will really start to call him a pervert then.

“i’m free on saturday,” you say, turning towards him to offer him a yogurt cup.

he stares at it for a second before taking it, letting his fingertips linger where they brush against yours.

“okay then,” he says, allowing himself the shadow of a smile as you ask him what his favorite yogurt flavor is, and he asks you your favorite toppings. and it’s easy like this, isn’t it? how had he ever thought this difficult? had it ever been? the bell-like sonance of your voice, the tinkling texture of your laughter, the great, blossoming fire licking up, up from the base of his stomach all the way to the top of his chest.

why had he ever scorned this as strange? as unnatural?

how could he have ever thought this to be a mere sidequest when this — he’s sure of it now — is the entire point of the game to begin with? because don’t all roads lead to this? to this giddiness and certainty? to this… unshakable knowing that he, even in his youth, is held still by in it’s immensity that this could be something more?

something like… love?

but it’s too early for that yet, and he’s getting ahead of himself. skipping the levels and peering at the walkthroughs.

he forces himself to focus on the tang of the yogurt, the crunch of the oreo chunks. he anchors himself to the grace of your smile and the weight of your laughter.

and after, when the yogurt is done and the night is still young, he offers to walk you home again. and this time, he doesn’t wait for you to close the gap between your bodies — he leans down to do it himself. because somewhere between the space of then and now, he’s made the decision that he doesn’t want the shadow or the just-there-ness anymore. he wants the just and the there. separate and whole and oh.

so that’s where your noses go.

the kiss breaks between you and kenma leans in to unbreak it.

you make a small noise at the back of your throat and he has to keep himself from grinning.

there, again, another bottle-able sound.

he inches his hand up to cup your cheek and you lean into him, pressing both your palms to his chest. and for moments and moments and moments, the pair of you stay locked there, breaking and unbreaking the kiss again and again and again until finally, you press him away to take a breath.

you are breathless, and so is he.

and briefly, oh so briefly, kenma wonders as he looks at you, stares into your eyes as you look back at him, if this could be called dreaming.

“oi… oi kenma-kun?”

kenma blinks, frowning slightly as your face swims into view, his vision catching on the tiny gems glinting from your earlobes.

“h-huh?”

your face is inches from his, and the afternoon sun is warm against his skin. the classroom behind you is filled with the scent of a blossoming spring, trailing into what kenma already knows will be an absolutely sweltering tokyo summer.

your voice rings through him like knowing, and your smile, when he finally focuses on it with bleary eyes and a buzzing mind, looks something like the remnants a dream.

“do you have notes from yesterday’s class? i lent mine to kiyo in 2-b and she says her dog ate it.”

kenma chews on his lips as he weighs the answer on his tongue, and finally, he allows himself a tiny, secret smile as he digs around in his bag for the notebook, handing it to you as he says —

“you don’t actually believe that, do you?”

#kenma kozume #kozume kenma #haikyuu #haikyuu!!#kenma x reader #haikyuu x reader #haikyuu fluff #kenma fluff #kenma kozume fluff #kenma kozume x you #kenma kozume x reader #kenma x you #haikyuu imagines #haikyuu scenarios #kenma kozume imagines #haiCUTIES #floofy floof floof #/ vibRATES EXCITEDLY #pls pls pls pls pls tell me what you thought pls i am SO CURIOUS #and also let it NEVER BE SAID i do not feed the kenma stans yall #nearly 4k words PSH #there are so many THINGS in this fic that i am happy with -- not the least the circularity and the actual prose #bc i feel like this is one of those things that bears reading twice and im not just saying that bc i want ppl to read it multiple times #im saying it bc there are so many easter eggs and self-referential bits in the fic that i feel like u would enjoy on a second read through #im just sldkfjosid over the moon about this one and i know it's not super duper polished but i dont think it needs or want to be #ANYWAY HELLO kenma is a GREAT muse yall

229 notes · View notes