Archive of Our Own ^beta

Akaashi considers himself, by all accounts, an exceedingly ordinary person. It’s the things around him that are decidedly extraordinary—the daily dance around the floating teaspoons that stir sugar and cream into coffees as he stands at the microwave in the office break room; the commute through the bustling throngs of the city flanked by people walking miniature dragons and invisible collared… things on unbreakable leashes. Most extraordinary of all—and people around him are loathe to let him forget it—is that he is simply wonderful for being someone without magical capabilities working for a publisher that deals exclusively in publishing spellbooks and magic-related texts.

It speaks to his tenacity, recruiters had said, charming their coffees warm while they’d interviewed him for his position with flicks of their fingers (he offered a polite smile and sipped his own lukewarm latte from the machine downstairs); highlights his ambition, chimed in another of his managers during a performance review as his file fluttered across her desk and opened itself to the correct notes without lifting so much as a wrist (he nodded and thought back to the painstaking hours of creating a filing system by hand at his own desk); that he would want to pursue a career in magic despite his physical lack of it. 

Over the eighteen months since he’s taken the position, Akaashi has found that despite their indulgent fawning about his situation, he really doesn’t need magic for his position and deep down, frankly doesn’t understand the sanctimoniousness of it. Copy-editing for readability requires no supernatural providence—and that was precisely why, he’d realized, the job was given to him in the first place. Those who verified and catalogued the spells in the pages he reviewed needed magical talent, sure, but all he’d needed for his own role were eyes honed for grammatical sense and punctuation and a free forty hours a week.

Until forty hours became forty-three as the projects began to mount, and he worked through more of his lunch breaks than he took in the cafeteria. Then forty-three blurred into forty-five, then fifty as more work found its way onto the dwindling free space on his desk. It happened with the subtle progression of a light flurry that takes an entire night to transform into a blizzard, eight hours of slow-mounting snowflakes that project an unassuming danger. Scrolls of parchment and rubber-banded manuscripts were never charmed to move on their own, but began to find their way into his bag and across the tables in his apartment with him hardly ever noticing. His feet were never enchanted to stroll anywhere without his attention, but they began to find their way into the closest apothecary’s on the way home from the office with startling regularity—requests for potions now fall from his lips as easily as his take-out order at the restaurant that shares a wall one door over, and it all has to do with practice.

It’s on one of these occasions, at approximately seven in the evening—a 3 o’clock meeting had run over which pushed back his call with one project manager, delaying the final two hours he’d needed to work on edits for another—that he ducks into the shop and the clerk behind the counter, a willowy ash-blond boy whose name-tag reads Yahaba, fixes him with a shrewd look that comes with being the wrong type of regular. He turns and makes quick work of rifling through the shelves behind him, and sets two familiar squat green glass bottles on the counter beside the cash register.

Akaashi roots through his work bag among papers and folders to the bottom, where he extracts two of the same bottle type, empty and loosely-stoppered. He reaches back in to pull out two more; and then, under the expectant quirk of Yahaba’s eyebrow, a fifth and sixth.

The apothecary clerk makes a quiet show of moving the bottles onto the back counter for sanitizing and re-use, but Akaashi refuses to feel abashed. He simply pulls out his card and taps it lightly against the edge of the counter, glancing down at the watch on his left hand.

“Two Bright-Eyed Brews,” Yahaba murmurs to himself without looking up as his fingers find the buttons on the sale tablet. He doesn’t bother to ask if he needs anything else with the impressive smile Akaashi has seen him offer to others, but he knows not to be offended by this. Akaashi has been stopping into the trendy, clean-lined shop for the better part of nine months, and Yahaba has worked the closing shift for seven of them. He’d hardly batted an eye when Akaashi’s usual purchases of energy lozenges and focus tablets grew in quantity and frequency, but had grown slightly more shrewd with the introduction of the energy potions—the ones that were most potent when consumed within twenty-four hours of brewing; the ones that Akaashi stopped in for only after his day at the office was through.

Tonight, as Akaashi eschews the customarily-offered paper shopping bag in favor of tucking the bottles into his work satchel, Yahaba tells him to hold on for a moment. He disappears through the swinging door leading into the back and returns a moment later with a slender cobalt vial tucked between his fingers.

“This one’s no charge,” he declares as he passes it over the counter once Akaashi has tucked his card and wallet away. “Try it and let us know what you think.”

He gets an actual smile from Yahaba once he thanks him (albeit with a slightly-bemused expression and lilt to his gratitude), and leaves the shop with the vial carefully in-hand.

As he emerges onto the city sidewalk in the last fading sunlight of the day, he turns and reads the tiny cornflower label affixed to the side of the tube, and he’s not sure if the laugh that comes out in a huff through his nose is supposed to be amused, abashed, or mildly hysterical.

Goodnight Moon Sleeping Draught

(MAXIMUM STRENGTH, FAST ACTING—at least EIGHT HOURS guaranteed)

✩ ✩ ✩

Akaashi knows the world is vibrant around him before he even opens his eyes. He’s almost compelled not to open them at all, since invisible sensations start to fall into place all around him without the need to look. The first things that come are sounds—lapping of waves against a shoreline, ever-present but also somehow distant, the rhythmic, whooping bleat of seagulls suspended in the air above. Taste and scent fall in next, bringing brine into his nose to settle on his tongue like a weight, and the air that fills him in bracing gusts scrapes inside his nose and lungs with edges of sand and salt.

Touch is, perhaps, the most complex of these invisibilities. Akaashi feels aware of his body and the sensations against it, his black curls being tousled by the sea breeze and the rasp of his loose-weave sweater against skin that already feels the smallest bit tight from a day spent in the sun and sand. But there is also an awareness of touch that is less physical, one that lingers on the edge of his existence enough to be faintly aware, but not close enough to firmly grasp.

Akaashi smiles to himself—it feels like a secret—and leaves that sensation be. He slowly opens his eyes.

Coastline unfurls itself before him like the release of a sun-bleached boat sail, and doesn’t stop until it’s all he can see in any direction. Though the world is vibrant in its sensations, the actual color palette is muted: the sky is a soft, misty blue, like it’s been chosen carefully by an artist to be impossibly expansive but totally unobtrusive all at once; soft white sand shifts softly underfoot. The sea can’t make up its mind if it wants to be blue or green or grey, and even that choice is further diluted by white caps of foam fizzling on wave crests and the translucence of the water as it rushes up the shore.

As he takes it all in, Akaashi marvels quietly at the solitude of it all. Every detail feels like it’s been selected just for him, from the sturdiness of the sand underfoot that supports his strong gait as he walks; to the temperature of the wind that makes him cool enough to keep his sweater sleeves at his wrists and not his elbows, but not so much as to make him regret his shorts.

It’s quite the beautiful dream, expertly constructed by whoever decided to give it to him.

He ambles along the coast, deliberately placing one footstep in the wet sand and the other in the dry, and smiles bemusedly while he considers the strange quality these types of dreams always have. Often times, his brain feels hazy, like it’s muffled with a freshly-laundered blanket that’s warm and comforting while also completely smothering any opportunity to consider things beyond the here and now. Like work, like the mounting pile of parchments sitting somewhere nebulously far from here, like the fact  that dreams like these shouldn’t even be happening right now on account of—

A wave completely submerges both of his feet, ruining his idle pattern, and when he sucks in a surprised breath at the contact, the breeze tastes like chamomile and vanilla.

Often times, these dreams are ham-fisted in their single-minded goal of getting him to relax.

If you were a little more self-motivated with reducing your stress levels, you wouldn’t be forced to take a breather, would you?

The presence that orbits a few centimeters away from his body, somewhere between his shoulder blades where he can’t turn or touch, feels a little stronger, a little less abstract.

Akaashi smiles again, his eyes dropping to the white sand that sparkles underfoot when the diffuse sunlight hits it just so. A piece of amber sea glass washes up with the roll of the next wave over his feet, and he reaches down to pluck it from the tide. It might have been part of a bottle at some point, but now it lays smooth and solid in his palm, any rough edges polished away by the sand and surf. The water droplets still clinging to the surface shift in the light over his shoulder, turning the glass honey-gold, and it winks up at him.

The wind’s caresses of Akaashi’s hair grow more insistent, and he grows increasingly aware of the shape of the sunlight as it falls across his cheek. As he turns to look up at the offending object hanging innocuously in the sky, his feet gently slow to a stop without him realizing. When he turns back around to see what caused it, there’s no room in his warm drowse of a mind for unease at the sight of a coastal bungalow that’s suddenly appeared before him. Any alarm or suspicion he might’ve felt with the stressed parts of his mind forbidden here only thickens to pleasant surprise and curiosity. The things that exist here only do so for delight and exploration.

The things that exist here only want what’s best for him, and a part of Akaashi’s mind that is all his own knows there is something waiting for him in the waking world that wants the same.

And what’s best for him right now, he thinks with a realization and determination that builds in him like a tide, is for him to go there instead.

The breeze cards its fingers through his hair one more time, before slipping to the door of the sea cottage and jiggling it with a bit of emphasis. The faded sage door pitches inward against the latch enticingly.

Are you sure?

“I’m sure,” Akaashi says, out loud, and reaches for the door, unlocks it, and pulls it out towards himself.

✩ ✩ ✩

The time it takes for him to blink is between a millisecond and a year.

Now, the sensations come to him in reverse. A beige ceiling tinted warm with vanilla lamplight materializes into his bleary field of view, scored gently by overlapping shadows cast by furniture arranged on the floor. There’s an off-kilter feeling of being horizontal and twisted, something he slowly recognizes with the way his legs are sideways and his torso is supine that’s probably contributing to a pain in his neck that waffles between living behind his vertebra or in front of them. The groggy stickiness of deep sleep broken too soon settles on his tongue when he unpastes it from the roof of his mouth, but it all stops mattering quite so much when he takes a deep breath.

When the air comes into his lungs, it brings with it a mix of earthy pine, cinnamon, and the odd blend of staggering feeling and scent that Akaashi’s never been able to singularly place, but can only describe to himself with a moment: seated on a patio on a rain-soaked summer night, waiting for a strike of lightning and the powerful rumble of thunder that work in tandem to dazzle him entirely. When the air leaves his body, it takes with it a single word.

Tetsurou.

Gold sea-glass eyes flicker down to him, half-lidded and soft as they enter his field of view from above. The lamplight catches on the edges of his wild inky hair, turning errant locks of it to gold fleece, and drapes over the contours in his face to make his cheekbones and jaw even more infuriatingly impressive.

“Good morning, Keiji.”

Sound comes last, but it clasps tight to all the other senses wringing Akaashi’s body as he lays there, half-dazed and helpless to let it all overwhelm him entirely.

Fingers persist in a slow, careful slide through his hair, and don’t stop even as Akaashi raises his own hands to his eyes to rub them with a soft exhale.

“Is it morning?” he asks, sitting up a little by leveraging his elbows onto Kuroo’s knees, which currently support his head. His brain is starting to slot things back into place, and as each missing piece fits back together, his apprehension and alarm grows.

The levees holding back his deluge of anxious thoughts do not exist here, in a city apartment so far removed from the coast.

“Fuck—when did I fall asleep?” When he shifts again to sit all the way up, his elbow digs into the soft inside of the other man’s upper thigh, and he jerks and lets out a surprised hiss. Akaashi swivels his head to the coffee table that swims into focus, sees the folders and stacks of manuscripts that are electrifyingly familiar to the parts of him that default to being overwhelmed. He starts to reach for them, but the coffee table scoots pointedly away from his outstretched fingers, and a large hand curls itself on his shoulder and shoves him back down.

“It’s two in the morning,” Kuroo says with an exasperated huff, and returns one hand to tucking stray locks of Akaashi’s hair down where he’d fluffed them up before. The fingertips running along his scalp prickle with fizzling energy, no doubt from the spell he’d just cast. “On Friday night. Are you seriously thinking about work right now?”

Akaashi looks up at him from his reluctant position back on Kuroo’s lap, and tries to keep some semblance of calm among all of the sensations that are slowly catching up with him. Truth be told, there is a lot he’s thinking about right now. Perhaps too much for two in the morning.

On one hand, there is the growing awareness of work looming just out of reach, that he had brought home and set on the table after returning home to his apartment to settle in for a long night of review and lukewarm takeout. Now, slightly more aware of himself and his proceedings, he can’t even recall if he’d picked up the first manuscript from the stack to look at earlier. Apparently there’s an entire lapse of time missing from his memories—between the rough hours of eight o’clock and now, where he’d heated his takeout in the microwave, fridged the potions he’d purchased from the apothecary to take once he had food in his system, and sat down.

All alone, of course. Which broaches the next question that struggles to the surface on the other hand of Akaashi’s bewildered mind, and kicks up an entirely new host of surprise and confusion that fought to eclipse everything else. Belatedly, he suppresses a shiver that threatens to run through him at the sensation of Kuroo’s hands through his hair—the spark of magic shimmering over his scalp and his abject surprise at the other being there at all has him at a loss. All while his body is still lumbering to catch up with itself from the effects of the man’s other magic.

“What are you doing here?” he asks, feeling himself almost forcibly lulled back into a state of dreamy ease at the ministrations. And the reappearance of the niggling presence that’s settled itself back between his shoulder blades. “Thought you were still in England until Monday.”

“Work wrapped up early,” Kuroo replies in a lower, softer voice, like the fact that Akaashi is letting him pet his hair is a salve on his own mood. He wonders if it is really something he needs occasionally, if working to boost morale in hospitals is as much a drain on his own reserves as it is a benefit for everyone else. “Everyone was doing well, didn’t need much in the way of morale, with how well the hospital is run anyways. We decided we valued our weekend.” A wry little smirk crosses his face, and Akaashi only has a moment to sense the slight danger in it before Kuroo’s nails scratch lightly as he grips his hair and gives it a pointed little tug. “Unlike some people I know. Some people I happen to want to spend the weekend with.”

Akaashi grimaces and reaches up to swat at Kuroo’s offending hand. “I just wanted to catch up on some things.” Which is not a lie, of course. It’s just that when most people say this sort of thing, the statement implies they’ve had a temporary increase in workload and are getting through it as an occasional occupational hazard.

When Akaashi says it, the statement implies he’s in a constant increase in work load and is getting through it as a regular occupational necessity. This has been a fact of life since he’s started, since he and Kuroo have known each other.

Kuroo lets out a sigh that sags his shoulders, and Akaashi doesn’t feel the press of a hand at that unreachable part of his back before the other man’s disappointment levels itself into his stomach.

“I was worried about this,” he admits quietly, a bit uncomfortable but unflinching in its honesty. “It sounds silly, but I was worried about how you’d do for two weeks. You work so hard, Keiji. And it seems like they never, ever see that in you.”

Akaashi presses his lips together and refuses to meet the other’s eyes. “I’m just doing the best that I can.”

“I know you are.”

And that’s what kills Akaashi.

There’s truth to his words, he knows there is, but there’s incredible difficulty in acknowledging it. They never see much of anything in you beyond a worker to offload on, a voice whispers mutinously from the darkest corner of Akaashi’s mind.

There’s incredible difficulty in acknowledging that his bosses pay lip-service to his supposed ambition for not letting a silly thing like magical capability (or blatant lack thereof, in his case) stop him; but fail to acknowledge any utility beyond the fact that he works hard and takes on everything that’s asked of him, even to the point of overload.

And there is especially incredible difficulty in acknowledging all of these things in front of someone with so much utility, someone as valuable and skilled and rare as a highly-trained empath wizard, as an even more specialized Dream Spinner.

All of these thoughts come from the part of his head that seems to be the locus of all his anxieties, his doubts, and his stress. The part of his head that Kuroo works so tirelessly to silence in the dreams he creates for him, with threads of magic so fine and technique so careful it makes Akaashi want to shake apart like the delicate thing Kuroo occasionally treats him as. Not because he is, but because he deserves it.

Kuroo seemed to know Akaashi deserved this since the day he moved into the apartment next door, when he confessed months later to feeling the other’s stress and anxiety manifesting into an entirely corporeal thing that tormented him as much as it did his owner. To counteract it, he’d begun slipping his magic through the walls to weave restful dreams for him, peaceful snatches of respite Akaashi so desperately needed amongst the chaos of his life and the warfare of his psyche.

Even if there were questions of ethics and consent about the whole thing when he sheepishly admitted to doing it one night over dinner six months into their neighborship, it had been impossible to deny the sheer gravity of what Kuroo had been doing for him, the way that he wanted to look after Akaashi when even he himself seemed to be doing a terrible job of it. Especially when he himself seemed to be doing a terrible job of it.

It had been so easy to fall in love, after that. And Akaashi had done so completely without the gentle caress of emotional magic that fit so naturally at his back.

The fact that Kuroo was compassionate and seemed to listen and anticipate his needs all separate from the magic he was born with—but really, wasn’t his attentiveness and sincerity just another form of it?—had drawn Akaashi in and meant far more than a delicately-woven nights’ sleep (though those were an added bonus).

It had never been about the sleep. It still really isn’t, despite how vivid the shore felt tonight, how anything he conjures and offers to another—a cabin in the mountaintop, a midnight oasis, and a smoky-scented jazz lounge had all been star favorites of Kuroo’s brilliant talents over the past year—is always stunning and successful at setting them at ease.

It’s always about the fact Kuroo is perceptive, caring, and determined enough to try.

Instead of a phantom hand at the base of his nape, Akaashi feels real fingers lingering there, where they had slid down from the cradling of his head and hair. They’ve been patient, waiting for him to come back like the shore waits for the tide to return. When Akaashi glances up and meets Kuroo’s eyes, sea-glass against sea-water, Kuroo offers him a smile that tilts at the edge like a door wanting to swing inwards against a latch. The hand coaxes him up to a full sit, and his smile broadens when Akaashi moves to tuck himself closer to the other, draping his legs across his lap and resting his head against his chest instead of reaching for the papers on the table.

This, Akaashi knows, is how he can return the impossible, incredible things Kuroo gives to him without question. He can curl into this man, his boyfriend—nearly a year into things and six months cohabiting and the word, the thought still somehow brings a giddy flutter to his stomach that spreads to his fingers and toes—and express his gratitude for the things he offers, and try his best to afford the same to others.

Once, he’d fretted endlessly over having no magical prospects, especially when involved with someone so skilled at an incredibly rare and powerful form of magic. He still has those thoughts every so often, when the dark corner casts long shadows into the remaining spaces for his thoughts. But there was a surprising lesson he’d come into on his own, armed with a meticulously home-prepared birthday dinner and a night in watching the movies so stupid Kuroo would only admit that were his favorite with a furtive smile and a lingering look on the streaming search page. That night, Akaashi learned between kisses to his lips and throat and golden wide-eyed looks filled with starlight directed only at him, that he didn’t magic in the most traditional sense singing under his skin to feel complete, or worth something.

Akaashi learned, and continues to learn each day, each dream-hazy night flurried with feelings real and some manufactured (though no less genuine), that magic between them is a symbiotic inevitability. Though it chooses different forms between them, it is no less captivating and tailor-made to perfectly suit the other.

Just like the way Akaashi’s head fits seamlessly into the hollow of Kuroo’s neck and shoulder, where the cool-spice-ozone scent of his cologne and energy lingers most strongly. He leans in and presses a kiss to the exposed skin there, then another higher and another higher still.

Kuroo squirms just a bit under the touches, and when Akaashi pulls away just slightly he sees the tips of the other’s ears are a reddened pink even in the low, warm light.

“We should get some sleep,” Akaashi says, probably for the first time ever on account of the way Kuroo’s face is frozen hilariously between a broad grin and an astonished gape. He frowns and cards a hand up the back of the other man’s untamable bedhead, giving it a sharp tug in surprise retribution. Kuroo jerks and lets out a yelp, and Akaashi quickly smothers it with a full-bodied kiss to his open mouth.

“You should be more considerate about the noise,” he chastises into the breath they share for a moment before he stands up. “It’s two in the morning, you know. The neighbors are probably trying to sleep.”

“If they are,” Kuroo hums thoughtfully before his eyes glimmer amusedly. “Then I’d say that’s a vast improvement over my last neighbor. He was always wound up at all hours of the night—drove me all kinds of crazy. I even had to move on account of him.”

Akaashi rolls his eyes as he stretches his arms high over his head and luxuriates in the slow, delicious popping running up his back, ending with the final earth-shattering ease of the tension in his neck. He collapses back in on himself, boneless and standing, when he catches sight of the suitcase still tucked in their entry hallway.

“You didn’t unpack as soon as you got home?” he asks, turning to eye Kuroo who is, despite his packed bag, wearing what already looks to be flannel pajama pants and a worn t-shirt that probably saw better days in college.

Kuroo shakes his head, but shuffles over to retrieve the suitcase and roll it after them as they move into the bedroom. “Had more pressing matters to attend to,” he says with a hint of fond exasperation in his voice. “Like re-packing the perfectly good plate of untouched takeout that threatened to make rings on our coffee table. Did you eat a bite of it before you passed out?”

“I—ah.” he pauses for a moment to consider this. When Akaashi looks down at himself, he sees he is still in his rumpled dress shirt and slacks from work, but feels a little vindicated at the fact that he’d at least left his shoes at the genkan despite his apparent exhaustion. He feels a definite emptiness in the pit of his stomach, but decides not to bring it up—until his stomach growls abruptly, as if simply waiting for the most opportune moment to make its presence known.

Kuroo’s flat look, even only half-lit by the lamp he’d turned on by the bedside, suggests he won’t buy any answer other than no.

Akaashi relents only by changing into his pajamas and following the other into the kitchen when he fixes him with an expectant look.

He perches at their small dining table while Kuroo bustles about the kitchen with a surprising amount of vigor for someone that’s apparently spent the better part of the evening awake and using a significant amount of magic with precise control.

“You’re certainly energetic,” he observes with a raised eyebrow as Kuroo sets Akaashi’s abandoned dinner plate back down in front of him, re-warmed by a spell and not the microwave that always ran the risk of turning the meat rubbery.

“It’s the jet-lag,” Kuroo answers with a slight laugh, using an extra pair of chopsticks to nab the occasional bite of rice or vegetable from his plate. “After two weeks in London, my body says it’s six in the evening. We’ve perfected rapid inter-continental travel teleportation but have somehow fallen behind in the fact that we don’t just automatically readjust to timezones.”

Akaashi glances up at him flatly before primly shoveling a piece of tender marinated beef into his mouth. “The most unfortunate condition of all,” he says sagely. “To have command over matter and movement itself in completely supernatural ways, yet be beholden to the arcane rigors of the weak human body.”

His glib quip draws a full-bodied laugh from the other man that warms Akaashi straight down to his toes. He chews his food a bit more intently, if only to stave off the lopsided two-in-the-morning grin he knows would be on face if his mouth were free. When a comfortable silence settles over them for another moment, giving Akaashi room to breathe and think, he blinks.

“I actually think I have something that might help,” he says, getting to his feet and pushing the rest of his plate towards Kuroo to eat. He pads the short way to the fridge and opens it, searching for the blue phial tucked between the coffee creamer and milk in the door to help it stand upright. He returns to the table and stands at his boyfriend’s side when he passes him the slender vessel, which looks even smaller in Kuroo’s hands, whose fingers and palms are slightly thicker than Akaashi’s.

“What’s this?” he asks, narrowing his eyes at the label as he scoops up the last mouthful of meat, vegetables, and rice from the dinner plate.

“Sleeping draught,” Akaashi supplies, reaching over to grab the glass of water from his own place but still lingering close enough to brush shoulders with Kuroo as he tilts the phial on its side. “You know Yahaba at the apothecary? He said to try it.”

This is, of course, intensely amusing to Kuroo, who has the good nature (and acute awareness of how close one of Akaashi’s pointy elbows is to his ribs) to stifle his amused snort into the rim of the water glass he pilfers from the other as he drinks. “Is that so?”

“Yes,” Akaashi answers. “Though I think it’d be more immediately useful to you right now. You could get over your jetlag before Monday.”

Kuroo lets out a thoughtful hum at this, rakes a hand through his hair, before looking up at Akaashi with a dangerously cavalier look in his eyes. He tears through the wax seal and uncorks the bottle all at once with the sharp grip of one canine, and toasts the tiny blue tube all in a way that should not be as appealing as it is.

Akaashi gives him an eyeroll and a scoff at his dramatics for good measure, before leaning in to close the seated distance between them with a slow kiss on the lips.

“Get your own,” Kuroo teases, and Akaashi can taste the tingling remnants of spearmint and chamomile on his mouth and breath.

“I could say the same to you,” he grouses automatically, and catches Kuroo’s bottom lip between his teeth. “It was given to me.”

“Yes, but you have me to get you to sleep,” Kuroo tuts, tilting his head a little to trail his lips along Akaashi’s jaw in a tender, soothing rasp. “Who is going to give me the same pretty dreams?”

Akaashi pulls away with the plate and vial in hand, and turns to place them in the sink to be dealt with tomorrow. The answer comes out, almost automatically, before he can stop it. “I will, of course.”

He starts slightly when a warm, solid chest presses against him from behind, and an even warmer laugh practically melts Akaashi’s ear with its soft earnestness. “Yes,” he breathes, all shades of indescribably, vulnerably fond, and this, too, is something magical that Kuroo’s given him; and Akaashi has traded him the security to feel like he can do and say these things at all. “You absolutely will. Sorry for forgetting.”

“It’s fine,” Akaashi answers just as softly. He turns his head just so, and presses a kiss to the temple that’s exposed when Kuroo rests his face into the crook of his neck and shoulder. “Welcome home.”

All he receives in response is the sudden pull of dead weight against his back, and a frighteningly deep snore, the likes of which he’s never heard after months of sleeping beside he other.

Akaashi stumbles a bit under the weight, and the plates clatter in the sink. When he looks down at them, the words FAST ACTING stare up at him from the tiny blue vial, and he lets out a huff that hasn’t decided if it’s impressed or annoyed.

He’s unequivocally ready to sleep again as soon as he manhandles a passed-out Kuroo into the bedroom, and under the covers.

✩ ✩ ✩

When Akaashi opens his eyes, he is standing back at the faded green entrance to the bungalow with the soft swell of the sea all around him. He feels strangely bereft though, with no subtle comforting weight at his back; but this is overshadowed by the insistent pull in front of him, to press the door open the opposite way, to lean into the beautiful things his mind has in store when he fosters it all with kindness.

As his hand nudges the wood inwards over worn floorboards, kicking up dust that turns to fairy powder in the slanting shafts of sunlight that filter in through long windows, he peers around at the interior, and it feels like coming home to a place he’s never seen before.

Because the things that are most familiar here are the scent of evergreens and cinnamon and summer rain that skims through the air with every draft that makes the house seem like the house is breathing; and the glimmer of two identical pieces of gold glass in the light as Kuroo regards him from a sun-drenched couch, a book in his lap.

Akaashi walks towards the couch and lies down lengthwise, head perched in Kuroo’s lap, book nowhere in sight, and loveseat inexplicably widened enough to accommodate his six-foot frame.

“You can do anything you want in a dream, and you want to nap?” Kuroo asks with an incredulous laugh, though the fondness in his gaze and the slow trail his hands are already blazing towards his hair indicate he doesn’t have as much of a problem with it as he tries to claim.

Akaashi closes his eyes, checks again for the telltale presence of other hands here, farther than the ones he can see, and shrugs when the sensation is wholly absent. It’s hard to spin dreams, he supposes, when one is dead to the world for at least EIGHT HOURS, guaranteed.

“This is my dream,” he informs Kuroo resolutely. “Which means that I get to call the shots.”

When he sees Kuroo smile to himself—it feels like a secret—Akaashi leaves that be. He slowly closes his eyes.

✩ ✩ ✩

Kuroo stumbles into the living room, both bleary-eyed and still half-asleep, causing Akaashi to look up from the resignation letter he’s drafting on his computer. He adjusts his feet resting lightly on the perfectly-clean coffee table, and manages to quell a laugh into a small giggle at the sight of his boyfriend’s frankly ridiculous hair. Two weeks apart had tamed his morning imagination of the beast, it seemed.

“Good morning, Tetsurou,” he calls in a voice affecting the other man’s last night.

Kuroo rubs at his eyes and the back of his head and Akaashi hides a smile behind his laptop at adorably unguarded the other looks. “Is it morning?” he grumbles as he pads into the kitchen.

He checks the clock in the lower corner of his screen—it’s half-past noon. “No,” he says, unable to help the chuckle this time, and reminds himself to follow up with Yahaba the next time he sees him. Ten hours was surprisingly impressive for such a small concentration—he’d done a staggering amount of background reading on potions in the hopes that he might find the right job on any number of apothecary serials that regularly stocked the newsstands. A quick thumb over to his Internet browser pulled up a handful of promising openings, and he’d resolved to explain this all to Kuroo once the other had ingested enough of the best life-giving elixir of all—caffeine.

“Fuck!”

Akaashi starts at the clamber from the kitchen, laptop thrown down on the couch beside him as he leaps to his feet.

“Tetsurou?” he calls with no small amount of concern, making the trip to the kitchen in an urgently short number of strides. He rounds the corner before his eyes go wide and immediately start watering.

Kuroo isn’t faring much better, hand slapped over his nose and mouth as he cracks open the fridge door like it’s caging an animal.

“Keiji,” he says with a long-suffering patience he only recognizes from the times they have quite the relationship rows, but never anything like this, “what the fuck did you put in our fridge while I was away?”

Akaashi hedges toward the great offensive monolith, no doubt the source of the horrific odor hanging low in their kitchen like stench on a bog. He wonders a bit worriedly how long it would take this miasma to wilt the plants they’ve kept carefully-cultivated throughout their rather small Tokyo abode.

“Shit,” he manages, his nasal tone pinching off the severity in his tone as he cracks the door open and spies the suddenly-unmistakable culprit.

Two squat green glass bottles sitting innocuously in the door by the milk, which had undoubtedly curdled in its jug by now.

He recalls Yahaba’s dour look telling him the first times he’d bought the Bright-Eyed Brews to wash the bottles out thoroughly before recycling or disposing of them, and to do so right after using. His treatment of the whole matter had been eerily uncompromising, and now that he understands so completely, he wonders if it’s a lesson he will ever forget. He knows now—painfully, sickeningly well—that there is a definite basis for the need to consume these potions within a day of brewing.

And now he has two unused, noxious gas bombs in desperate need of disposing or else he and Kuroo risk some sort of building evacuation and a strongly-worded letter from their non-magical landlord about the dangers (and fees) of bringing supernaturally volatile materials into the place where so many lived. He pulls on one oven mitt hanging on a hook on the side of the fridge, and begins the sickening process of rinsing the brews down the drain with copious amounts of water and all the soap he thinks the plumbing can handle. All the while, Kuroo looks on from a corner of the kitchen with eyes wide like he can’t tell if Akaashi is his savior or his worst nightmare. Perhaps, for today, Akaashi would have to be okay with being both.

Unfortunately for his work ethic and general well-being, Akaashi muses, he’d never allowed one of these to expire before. They were always purchased and downed in pairs in preparation for a busy night and a busier morning twelve hours later. But now he’s not entirely certain he could ever stomach one of them again, now that the iconic citrusy scent of the brew lingers behind an arresting wall of putrefaction that will, with complete certainty, mar the sensory memory of this particular potion forever. (They might even have to strike oranges from their standing spot on the grocery list, at least for a little while.)

It’s neither here nor there, he decides as he rinses the last of the sludge down the drain and Kuroo sucks in a great relieved breath after casting an air circulation charm. He then rushes over to embrace Akaashi with exultant gratitude, decrying how great he was, but also what the hell was he thinking, purchasing something so horrible. Akaashi wonders if he’ll still remain the savior if he swears up and down to his boyfriend that although he loves Yahaba and his team and they can do some incredible things around an apothecary, last night was the last time he will ever purchase Bright-Eyed Brews again.

He no longer has much need for all-nighters in the days to come, anyway.