|| KUROKEN ONESHOTS ||

Ouroboros

Kenma had a favourite pair of mittens. They were striped - black and red, like Nekoma - a Christmas present Kuroo had given him two years prior, when Kenma hadn't even attended Nekoma. When he'd unwrapped his gift, confusion must have shown on his face, because Kuroo stammered out an explanation: "It's for when you come to my matches. The gym's heating sucks." He'd paused and smiled awkwardly, before adding: "Plus, I know your fingers are always cold."

It was true: every year, in the winter, he'd wake up with freezing hands, a thing he constantly complained about because it prevented him from being able to properly tap on the buttons of his controller for his routine, pre-breakfast gaming session. His hands ran cold. Kuroo's gift was thoughtful, like Kuroo himself, who was a good listener and a good people pleaser, but it wasn't much: the mittens were poorer quality than the pair of gloves his mother had bought him to colour-match his school uniform exactly, and they kept his hands less warm. Nonetheless, like it often happened when it came to Kuroo, Kenma became quickly obsessed with them. It wasn't because of their usefulness, nor was it because they were tangible proof that Kuroo still cared about him even after changing schools; it was because of how it made him feel to wear those two colours in front of everyone. The mittens had made him feel the way he felt when he won at volleyball: big, like he belonged somewhere, the perfectly working cog of a perfectly working machine. Which was to say: the mittens had made him feel the way he felt when he was around Kuroo. They said: Look! I'm Kuroo's friend! I came to watch him win! and he'd worn them even during the spring and summer matches, enjoying the thud of wool touching wool whenever he clapped at something.

It was more embarrassing to wear them now that he was actually a Nekoma student, but he still haphazardly put them on before getting out of his front door.

Kuroo Tetsurou stood at the end of the driveway, surrounded on all sides by snow as white as his shit-eating grin. The cold had always looked good on him.

"Why do you look so happy?" Kenma called out to him. "Yaku just ditched us."

"No reason, just thinking about how I've outdone myself this year and you'll never be on my level, ever," Kuroo replied. He paused. "Wait. Ditched?"

"Yeah, haven't you read his text?" Kuroo shook his head. That explained his good mood. He certainly wouldn't have been smiling like that if he'd known that the Christmas Eve Team Outing he had organized had miserably failed. Kenma watched him read the text now, rolling his eyes at it and then shaking his head again. That was the only possible reaction to an excuse as shitty as Yaku's - So sorry guys, need to do some emergency Christmas shopping, I can't be there on time.

"So what, it's just you, me and Yamamoto?" Kuroo asked.

"Sounds like my standard lunch break," Kenma sighed. He didn't care that the others wouldn't come - he liked it best when it was just the two of them anyway - but he resented them a lot for not realizing how much these things mattered to Kuroo. If it was a captain's job to bring out the best out of his team, what was the team's job if not to go where their captain lead? "I told you, Tora's the only guy you can trust to always show up on time."

They began to walk. The sun shone so hard that the snow glittered, but not hard enough for it to melt. Kenma watched its reflection glimmer inside Kuroo's pitch black eyes, which allowed him to catch the exact moment when Kuroo's expression went from upset to mischievous again. "What about Santa Clause? He'll show up on time, tonight. At least for you, I'm pretty sure."

This was the most Kuroo way to say he'd gotten Kenma a present. After so many years spent being Kuroo's friend, Kenma privately took a great amount of pride in recognizing his speech patterns, the way he said things without saying them because he was too awkward to say: I thought of you. "Is that what you meant earlier? When you said you've outdone yourself."