𝐋𝐎𝐕𝐄 𝐌𝐄 𝐌𝐎𝐑𝐄 | 𝐲𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐞 ! 𝐤𝐮𝐫𝐨𝐨 𝐱 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫 |

15: body

Once Kuroo had dropped you off at your house and returned to his own, he got down to business.

Snapping on a pair of disposable latex gloves, he stripped down to his boxers and gathered his supplies. Opening the door to the bathroom, he was met with the stench of dead, festering flesh. He gagged involuntarily and covered his mouth and nose with the back of his forearm. He laid out the tools on the bathroom bench and approached the body — he found himself not thinking of it as 'Kenma' anymore, but just 'the body' — and hovered over it, deciding where to start.

"Well, there's a first time for everything," he muttered to himself.

He grabbed a pair of scissors off the bathroom bench and started clipping the two-toned hair as close to the roots as he could, watching with odd satisfaction as the locks of dyed hair fell to the bottom of the bath tub.

Next he began the painstaking task of detaching the fingernails and toenails from their beds. He selected a pair of pliers and used them to tug out each nail, one by one. The body had gone into livor mortis — the blood had settled at the lower part of the body in coagulation— so the nail beds didn't really bleed so much as ooze a little fluid. He traded the pliers for a small, razor-sharp knife and dragged the blade through the skin of the fingertips, mutilating any trace of fingerprints.

Kuroo stepped back from the body and sighed, pushing his bangs back with the back of his hand, perspiration beading on his forehead.

He hummed to himself in a low tone as he returned to the pliers and forced the jaw open, gripping the first tooth in between the pincers and yanking hard. The sound of the enamel dislodging from the jaw was enough to make even him wince.

When he'd rid the body of all the parts that it could be identified by, Kuroo started on... condensing it.

After all, it would be too difficult to carry an entire body and hide it in one piece.

"I'll be back," Kuroo told the body. "Don't move." Ha, he laughed to himself. As if.

He wandered downstairs and ventured into the garage, a dusty space that held boxes of memories and useless junk. He pushed through a stack of storage boxes until he found what he was looking for.

The saw gleamed silver in the sparse, dingy lighting of the garage, its blade flecked with specks of rust but otherwise unblemished.

Kuroo returned to the bathroom and shifted the body slightly so he had a better angle to work at. Sawing through the epidermis and inner layers of skin was easy enough, but dragging the blade back and forth through brittle bone required more effort. The sickening sound of metal grating on marrow filled the small room.

He wasn't sure if it was minutes or hours later, but eventually he was rewarded with four limbs and a head detached from the torso, each appendages sawed off haphazardly, the skin ripped and jagged, colourless fluid leaking from them.

Kuroo pulled out two large plastic bags, the kind used for industrial rubbish bins. He wrapped the torso in one, and in the other, put the four limbs in. He was left with the head, the neck hanging open garishly, the oesophagus and bones of the cervical spine visible between shreds of flesh. And the smell. God, the smell. He thought his nostrils would become accustomed to it, but the stench seemed to wrap itself in every fibre of his being until he could taste it in his throat and feel it behind his eyes. It smelled like rotting meat and maggots and decay.

Two golden feline eyes stared out of the head at Kuroo, blank and empty; their usual brightness and lustre had been replaced with the dull curtain of death.

For just a moment, Kuroo saw Kenma looking at him, The boy he'd known since his childhood, every day they'd spent playing together, at school every day, starting volleyball together, playing video games on the weekends, talking about family and friends and petty drama that went on in their daily lives. The way Kenma would jump in surprise every time Kuroo smiled at him, before huffily and embarrassedly returning the grin back.

But that mouth no longer smiled, those eyes no longer told Kuroo how the other boy had been feeling when words couldn't.

Kuroo looked away from the eyes, and shoved the head into the bag with the limbs. He hauled both bags over his shoulder and traipsed down the stairs, walking out the door to his back garden. He grabbed a shovel from where it was lying around from the last time his father had done any garden work — at least seven or eight years ago, probably. The grass had shrivelled up, turned brown, and died long ago, but the ground underneath was still soft.

Kuroo slammed the shovel into the ground with all his strength and pushed down on the bottom part with his foot until he heard the earth beneath it shift. Dig, scoop out, repeat.

Six feet under.

Night fell, the sky painting itself varying shades of grey before blending into a heavy blackness, enveloping Kuroo's activity in a thick blanket of security from any prying eyes that may be around.

When the hole was finally deep enough, Kuroo lowered the two plastic bags into the ground and began covering them back up, filling the hole with the loose dirt.

At one o'clock in the morning, he staggered back inside, exhausted, his hands covered in blisters even through the gloves. He peeled off his gloves and disposed of them, along with the hair and nails in the bathroom. Running the bathtub tap, he washed away any traces of bodily fluids, scrubbing at the porcelain until it gleamed.

He gathered up the teeth, the final piece of evidence left, the only reminder that Kenma had been here. He was going to throw them out, he really was, but another idea came to him.

Later.

Kuroo cleaned himself up, jumping underneath the shower head and thourughly ridding himself of any sign of the body. He watched his feet in the shower as the water swirled around them, tinged with just the faintest streak of red.

Finally done, Kuroo stumbled into his room exhaustedly, flopping onto his bed and reaching for a bottle of vodka he'd left on the bedside table. He flicked the cap off and drank, staring at the hundreds of photographs of you he had pinned all over the walls, until his eyelids were too heavy to keep open any longer.