#Akiteru x Reader | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

pin-k-ink · 13 days

Text

eventide // tsukishima kei

tw ⇢ dub-con, emotional manipulation, toxic/unhealthy relationship, borderline possessive kei, minor age gap (reader is 5 years older), sexual tension, angst, pining, akiteru x reader if you squint, fingering, unprotected sex, dry humping, begging, obsession, tsukki is kinda pervy

wc ⇢ 19k 💀

a/n: i did that thing again where i don’t know how to end a fic

Tsukishima was in hell. Every fiber of his being burned with an agonizing combination of desire and torment as your presence infiltrated his senses. The sweet, subtle fragrance of your perfume was a cruel tease, inflaming him while reminding him you belonged to someone else. His brother's easy laughter at some witticism you'd uttered grated in Tsukishima's ears like nails on a chalkboard.

He watched, jaw clenched, as you playfully swatted Akiteru's arm, bodies casually invading each other's space with a comfortable intimacy Tsukishima could only fantasize about. Your sparkling eyes crinkled at the corners when you giggled at his brother's reply, full lips stretched in an effortless smile that Tsukishima longed to taste.

Forcing his gaze away from the plump curves of your mouth, he let his eyes brazenly rake over the rest of your figure. The thin cotton of your shirt sculpted to the valleys and hills of your form, clinging in a way that made Tsukishima's throat go dry. He imagined peeling it off you slowly, calloused fingers tracing patterns on the bare skin underneath as you arched shamelessly into his touch.

A bead of sweat trickled down the side of Tsukishima's neck. He shifted, pressing his thighs together as arousal stirred low in his abdomen. Silently, he cursed his brother's obliviousness to the temptation posed by your presence. Akiteru was a fool, taking your closeness for granted when any sane man would endeavor to thoroughly map every luscious inch of you with his hands and mouth.

"You okay over there, Kei?" Your lilting voice sliced through his lascivious haze. Tsukishima's eyes snapped up to meet your concerned gaze, heart pounding. Heat flooded his cheeks at being caught staring so brazenly. Recovering quickly, he mustered his most disdainful sneer.

"I'm fine. Though this room reeks of desperation..." He let the insult hang heavy in the air between you.

You blinked at him owlishly for a moment before rolling your eyes in exasperation. "Wow, as charming as ever I see," you drawled sarcastically.

Tsukishima's mouth curved into a smirk at having successfully riled you. He vastly preferred this - the playful back-and-forth barbs, the simmering undercurrent of antagonism - to the torturous visions of you wrapped around his brother. At least when you were riled up at him, those molten eyes were focused solely on Tsukishima.

"Don't dish it out if you can't take it," he goaded, taking petty satisfaction in the way your nostrils flared. You opened your mouth - likely to unleash a biting retort - but Akiteru spoke first.

"Come on you two, can we not do this today?" His brother sighed long-sufferingly. "It's bad enough having to deal with Kei's prickly 'holier-than-thou' attitude regularly."

A muscle in Tsukishima's jaw ticked as your gaze flickered briefly back to Akiteru. The unspoken bond between the two of you ignited a searing flare of jealousy in his gut. How easy it would be for Akiteru to simply reach out and pull you against him, burying his face into the inviting valley of your breasts as you giggled and playfully swatted him away...

The visions tormenting Tsukishima now were memories from long ago when he was just a child - back when you were still a frequent, dazzlingly bright fixture in the Tsukishima household. Back when his crush was new, freshly blossoming with the first tingling tendrils of innocent infatuation.

"Neeee-san!" The childish nickname you'd allowed only Tsukishima to use tumbled eagerly from his lips. At 6 years old, you were his biggest hero, the shining center of his universe.

You turned with a sunny smile, kneeling down to his level as he bounded up to you. "Well if it isn't my favorite little monster!" You reached out to ruffle his tousled blonde hair affectionately.

Tsukishima felt his face heat up at the casual contact and endearment, his child-self not yet able to tamp down the wide, unabashed grin of pure joy that broke across his features. Up close, your beauty was staggering - enough to leave him at a loss for words.

"Guess what, nee-san? I scored a whole bunch of points in volleyball practice today!" His small hands cupped together proudly as if cradling something precious.

"That's amazing, Kei!" You reached out to tousle his hair again, shining with genuine pride. The simple praise and affection in your radiant smile made his little heart swell.

"Soon I'll be so good that I can be on the same team as Aki-nii!" He proclaimed boldly. The thought of getting to play on the court alongside you and his older brother filled him with giddy excitement.

Your grin twitched ever so slightly. "I-I can't wait to see that! You'll have to show me some of your awesome moves."

"Kei, stop hogging nee-chan's to yourself." The familiar teasing lilt of Akiteru's voice cut through your moment. Tsukishima's smile dimmed as his older brother sauntered over, all lean muscle and easy confidence even at 11 years old.

You straightened up, attention diverted as Akiteru draped a casual arm around your shoulders. A flare of irrational irritation and something darker - something Tsukishima didn't yet have the emotional vocabulary for - flickered in the young boy's chest as you leaned comfortably into the familiar half-embrace.

In that moment, Akiteru's height, his striking looks, the similarities you two shared down to the very expression on your faces - it all became suddenly, viscerally apparent to Tsukishima's childish perceptions. A vise constricted in his small ribcage as he watched his brother playfully tug on one of your pigtails, laughing at some shared joke while you made a face of mock indignation.

It was like watching the formation of a black hole, inexorably drawing you into its singularity while slowly, agonizingly severing the gravitational tethers that once bound you to Tsukishima's world. The younger brother who had heretofore basked in the warmth of your attentions was now forgotten, cast into the cold outer orbit of your presence.

Akiteru was the sun in your universe now. And deep in the recesses of Tsukishima's fragile psyche, something cracked and began bleeding a venomous darkness into his once-bright worldview.

Over the years, as innocence shed away and Tsukishima's mind became increasingly shrouded in cynicism, that inky blight took root and flourished. What had started as a pure, sunny admiration for his radiant "nee-san" contorted into an obsession - one that had him drinking in every detail of your features, hungrily cataloging them to memory.

The way your brows knit adorably when you frowned at Akiteru. The hint of pink tongue peeking through parted lips as you concentrated with laser-focus during your studies. The soft curves of your thighs flexing as you'd settle next to him on the couch.

Each seemingly innocuous observation was seared into Tsukishima's consciousness, hoarded and endlessly examined in his quieter moments like a dragon with its plundered treasures. You became a fixation - the sole point of equilibrium in his turbulent sea of adolescent turmoil and fragile self-worth.

And with that fixation came the bitter, curdling stain of jealousy and resentment toward his brother whenever Akiteru was the recipient of your unguarded grins, your teasing quips, your casual touches. It should have been Tsukishima on the receiving end of that affection, those tantalizing glimpses into who you truly were behind the facade of pure sunshine.

So he pushed you away, reliable as the turning of the seasons. Each friendly overture, every attempt to draw the younger Tsukishima into your invigorating orbit, was rebuffed with chalky disdain and steadily more acidic barbs. If he couldn't possess the closeness he craved, could not make you solely his, then he would take petty satisfaction in making your interactions as antagonistic and unpleasant as possible.

At least that way, when you inevitably drifted out of their lives for good as you and Akiteru grew up and moved on, the final shreds of Tsukishima's attachment to you would be severed cleanly. His descent into hell would be complete.

By the time Tsukishima was in high school, his once bright and shiny infatuation had fully warped into something darker, grittier - a compulsion that simmered insidiously beneath his carefully crafted ennui.

You still came around occasionally, social spheres intertwined through your unshakable bond with Akiteru. But Tsukishima was no longer the eager, energetic child who fawned over your presence. At 16, he regarded you through lowered lashes and a veil of shuttered disinterest, shoulders hunched in apparent nonchalance.

But beneath that indifferent veneer, he studied you with a new, ravenous sort of hunger. He drank in the gentle swell of your breasts straining against cotton shirts, eyes tracing the feminine flare of your hips before snapping away guiltily. A bead of sweat rolled down the back of his neck as inappropriate thoughts crept incessantly into the shadowy recesses of his mind.

More than anything, Tsukishima longed to provoke a reaction from you any way he could - to thoroughly shatter that serene, put-together front and expose the rawer facets of your spirit that Akiteru was firmly embedded in. He discovered a guilty sort of gratification in needling you, in watching your brows pinch and those full lips purse in displeasure.

"How's the view from that ivory tower, Princess?" The mocking jeer dripped from Tsukishima's lips as he slouched further into the couch cushions. You'd let yourself into the Tsukishima residence as usual, breezing through with a familiar comfort that made something twist viciously in Tsukishima's gut.

You paused in the entryway, shooting him an arch look. "Delightful, as always, thanks for asking. No snide remarks from the misanthropic peanut gallery today?" Your tone was laced with faux sweetness.

Tsukishima scoffed loudly. "That's just the dry wit you've come to despise me for." He knew he should quit while he was ahead, but something diabolical unfurled in his chest at the prospect of getting a genuine rise out of you.

"Though I can't exactly blame you for feeling pissy. It must be rough being a broke college student indebted to my family's charity when Aki-nii takes pity and lets you crash here..."

He trailed off meaningfully, lips curling into a derisive sneer as he took petty delight in the flash of humiliation and anger that flickered across your features. Your cheeks colored furiously, but Tsukishima's sharpened senses zeroed in on the slight part of your lips, the rise and fall of your chest as you struggled to control your breathing.

"You arrogant little shit," you spat, any attempt at civility abandoned. "Is this something you get off on? Tearing people down to make yourself feel better about what a pathetic excuse for a human being you are?"

Inwardly, Tsukishima preened at having successfully riled you up. Your scorching anger was so much better than the nonchalant cordiality that came from simply coexisting on the periphery of Akiteru's inner circle. This ire, this passion - it meant you saw him, truly saw the young man he'd become instead of the pesky kid brother to be dismissed.

But what really captivated Tsukishima was the tantalizing flush riding high on your cheekbones, the slightly disheveled state of your hair where you'd no doubt run agitated fingers through it. He wanted to thoroughly dismantle your poise, to unravel you completely and revel in the ravished aftermath.

"Maybe a little," he murmured huskily, molten eyes roving over the swell of your lips and the tempting stretch of your shirt across your chest. "If you're offering something more...stimulating."

The shock and confused hurt that flickered across your features struck Tsukishima like a physical blow, momentarily robbing the breath from his lungs. This wasn't what he'd wanted - to genuinely wound you. He tamped down the nauseated guilt rapidly unfurling in his gut, shoving it into a distant recess of his mind.

This was for the best, he told himself sternly. To wrench himself free of this sick obsession that seemed to deepen and fester with each passing year. If he burned all his bridges, salted the earth of your relationship until only bitter ruin remained, maybe then he could escape the gravitic pull of his compulsion.

But as you whirled on your heel, storming from the Tsukishima household with purposeful strides, a dim part of him knew the truth. There would be no deliverance, no peace from this hell of his own making. He was utterly, inescapably possessed by his fixation on you.

Tsukishima's fists clenched impotently as he watched you go, dark appetite roiling like the churning of a brewing storm barely contained beneath his skin.

In the weeks and months that followed, a new dynamic took shape between you and Tsukishima - one charged with antagonistic tension, rife with unspoken challenge. Like ill-fated celestial bodies, your respective orbits seemed to contract inexorably despite both parties' attempts at maintaining distance.

You still frequented the Tsukishima household with familiar ease, though your interactions with the youngest brother were now clipped and edged with palpable hostility. Tsukishima met you thrust for thrust, deflecting your biting remarks with indolent indifference or firing back with surgical precision to lacerate your composure.

But beneath his sardonic visage, an incessant hunger blazed. He found his gaze lingering on the plush curves of your mouth as you spoke, trailing down the delicious swell of your breasts in quiet moments when you were distracted. Tsukishima's fingers twitched with the phantom urge to reach out and map the lines of your body, to discover whether your skin was truly as soft as it looked.

The tension built to a crescendo one sweltering summer evening. You and Akiteru were lounging in the backyard, lingering over the last dredges of grilled food and chilled beverages. Tsukishima stepped outside, shirtless and barefoot after an ill-timed volleyball practice.

His gaze snagged immediately on the smooth expanse of your bare legs, mercilessly exposed by the tiny athletic shorts you wore. The dusky twilight gloom seemed to sharpen your features into an intoxicating contrast of light and shadow - the pert tip of your nose, those pillowy lips parted on a laugh at something Akiteru murmured.

You caught sight of Tsukishima loitering in the doorway like a silent wraith, amusement morphing into a slight frown. "Don't you have somewhere else to be, beanpole?" The mild insult lacked any genuine venom.

Tsukishima shrugged one loose shoulder lazily. "What, and miss the chance to bask in your radiant presence?" His tone dripped with saccharine insincerity.

You scoffed loudly, a few loose tendrils of hair fluttering against your neck as you shook your head. The motion drew Tsukishima's heated stare like a magnet. He wanted to skim his fingers over that rapidly fluttering pulse point, to discover whether your heart raced with the same forbidden thrill as his own.

"Why don't you give it a rest already?" You sighed in exasperation. "This whole act of yours is exhausting. What will it take for you to stop being such a massive jackass all the time?"

"Hmm maybe if you asked nicely..." Tsukishima purred, taking a few slow, predatory steps closer until he loomed over your seated form. "And demonstrated proper motivation."

The suggestive weight of his words hung thickly in the humid air between you, viscous and suffocating. Tsukishima watched hungrily as your pupils blew wide, lips parting in a silent, shocked inhale. Satisfaction and something darker - something ravenous and scorching - licked through his veins like wildfire.

He drank in the sight of your chest rising and falling shallowly, the pretty flush riding high on your cheekbones while you struggled to mask your rattled reaction behind weak derision.

"Wow, so this is what you've been reduced to? Pathetic."

The scathing assessment ought to have doused the banked embers of Tsukishima's arousal. But he found he craved more - not your disgust, but the visceral emotion that roiled beneath. The sight of you thoroughly unraveled, stripped of your endless veneer of affable composure.

"Nothing pathetic about being honest with my...desires." His voice dropped to a low, gravelly purr. You sucked in a sharp breath when he abruptly crouched next to you, close enough for his warmth to bleed onto your arm.

Tsukishima's eyes roamed insolently over the delicate hollow of your throat, the gentle swell of cleavage peeking from your loose neckline. So close now, he could make out the fluttering pulse beneath your jaw, the subtle outline of your nipples through the thin fabric.

All he had to do was reach out, boldly bridge that searing distance between you, and -

"Kei! That's enough, man." Akiteru's hand landed heavily on Tsukishima's shoulder, shattering the trance. Tsukishima's gaze snapped up to find his brother regarding him with a bemused sort of confusion and concern. You sat beside them, rooted in place and wide-eyed with mingled disbelief and trepidation.

With an inward snarl, Tsukishima shrugged off his brother's grip and straightened to his full height. Outwardly, his expression remained one of languid, hooded disinterest. But inside, a tumultuous storm of thwarted desire, petulant frustration and clawing obsession swirled like a maelstrom preparing to burst its confines.

A muscle in his jaw ticked while he regarded you imperiously. You visibly swallowed under the weight of his stare, hands twisting in your lap. Tsukishima committed every minute detail of your ruffled appearance to scorching memory before spinning on his heel and stalking away without a word.

His skin felt too tight, overhot, as if branding itself permanently with the impression of this moment - of how badly he had shattered the fragile bounds of propriety in his reckless pursuit of your undoing. There would be no coming back from this, no soothing balm of remedied boundaries or reassurances of indifference.

Tsukishima had allowed the darkness to breach its subterranean chambers and spill slobberingly into the piercing light of day. And some primal, depraved part of himself delighted in it.

In the crucible of late adolescence, any restraint Tsukishima once possessed over his baser urges and obtrusive thoughts withered away. Your presence had become an obsession unfurled, a compulsion to be sated at all costs - dignity and propriety be damned.

He sought you out like a man possessed, intentionally insinuating himself into situations where your paths would cross no matter how tenuous the pretext. Tsukishima drank in every searing detail of your features with ravenous focus, cataloging each fitful breath and bitten-off gasp whenever his words or proximity provoked a reaction.

Your relationships with Akiteru strained under the weight of Tsukishima's unchecked antagonism. Undaunted, he would needle you relentlessly, slinging barbs and salacious insinuations with the cold precision of a sniper's rifle until your composure splintered.

The way your nostrils flared when you struggled to reign in your temper, or the rapid flutter of your pulse hammering beneath the delicate hollow of your throat - each detail was seared into Tsukishima's consciousness and savored in the quiet, sweltering moments when he was alone.

At eighteen, the full flush of adulthood brought with it a new,remorseless intensity to Tsukishima's unhealthy fixation. No longer content to merely bask in your flustered unraveling, he ached to systematically dismantle every aspect of your self-restraint until you were left debauched and keening against him, rational mind whited out by unbearable pleasure.

One evening, you'd come over to collect some belongings in preparation for moving out. Tsukishima emerged from the stifling humidity of his bedroom, towel slung low on his lean hips, to find you rummaging through a box of miscellany.

His calloused fingers clenched spasmodically at his sides as you bent at the waist, shapely backside straining against form-fitting denim as you rifled through the clutter. Tsukishima's mouth went dry as cotton, eyes tracing the gentle inward curve of your spine before snapping instinctively to the generous swell of your ass.

An inarticulate grunt forced its way past his frozen lips before he could think better of it. You jolted upright, whirling to face him with wide, startled eyes and parted lips. Dimly, Tsukishima registered the flush that creeped over your cheekbones as you processed his state of undress, gaze skating unsubtly over the sculpted planes of his abdomen before guiltily averting.

"Uh, didn't realize you were...around," you mumbled, suddenly flustered in a way he found utterly captivating. Tsukishima's blood thrummed with smoldering satisfaction at having thrown you off-balance so thoroughly with just his physical presence.

His signature smirk was firmly back in place as he oh-so-casually padded closer, movements loose and predatory. "My apologies, I'll be sure to send the butler with my arrival announcements next time."

You scowled at the mocking jibe, seeming to regain some semblance of equilibrium...until Tsukishima's fingertips ghosted over the dip of your waist in passing. A harsh, shuddering inhale stuttered through your lips at the fleeting contact, gaze snapping up to lock with his. The weight of his heavy-lidded stare, dark and inscrutable, made you visibly swallow.

"S-stop looking at me like that, you creep," you stammered, curling inward defensively as you clutched the forgotten box to your midriff.

Tsukishima hummed, a low rumbling purr of a sound as he boldly sidestepped until the solid wall of his chest grazed your shoulder. You sucked in a sharp breath, freezing in place as he leaned down until his mouth was a hairsbreadth from your ear. He could smell the clean, faintly floral scent of your shampoo, feel the heated puff of your unsteady breathing fanning over his collarbones.

"Looking at you how, exactly?" Tsukishima murmured, allowing a teasing lilt to bleed into each velvet syllable. He turned his head a fraction, letting his lips brush ever-so-lightly against the curved shell of your ear as he spoke. Gratification sang through his blood as you shivered involuntarily against him.

"Like the pathetic, desperate thing you are, gawking at me like a piece of meat," you shot back in a threadbare tone that lacked any genuine conviction.

A rasping chuckle rattled from Tsukishima's chest in response. With agonizing slowness, he shifted until his nose skimmed over the rapid pulse fluttering just beneath your jaw - until his lips hovered a scant hairsbreadth from yours, so close he could feel your shallow, trembling exhalations ghosting over them.

"And what if I was?" he breathed, voice pitched low enough to rasp like gravel in his throat. "What if I told you how badly I want to - "

You cut him off with a strangled noise, abruptly shoving him away with an uncoordinated flail of limbs and putting a few feet of distance between you. Your expression twisted into one of mingled outrage and bewilderment.

"What the hell is wrong with you, Kei!?" You hissed acidicly, clutching the forgotten box closer like a shield as you struggled to recapture an authoritative tone. "Was this some kind of twisted game to you? Some fucked up power play to make me uncomfortable?"

Tsukishima simply stared back impassively, expression a carefully curated mask of nonchalant indifference despite the molten churn of need and thwarted yearning simmering like a banked fire in his veins. His tongue traced the plush swell of his lower lip slowly, greedily snagging on the taste of your floral shampoo still clinging to his senses.

With steady, unhurried movements, he thumbed the towel slung low on his hips, drawing your gaze like a magnet to the subtle shift of musculature in his lower abdomen. Your breath audibly hitched, gaze darkening with a mixture of reproach and that achingly familiar spark of restrained want.

"Does acting coy and clueless really work for anyone?" He rumbled at last, deep timbre threaded with enough blatant suggestion to stain the air between you a virulent shade of crimson. "I don't play games... When I say I want something, I pursue it with a singular, ruthless focus."

He held your turbulent gaze steadily, letting the full weight of his obsession - his absolute compulsion towards you - resonate in the pulsing silence. Your shuddering inhale echoed like a thunderclap before you seemed to rally some semblance of inner fortitude.

"You...you're disgusting," you rasped, retreating a few more stumbling paces towards the door. But the revulsion in your tone felt brittle, a flimsy construct struggling against the rip tide of molten tension steadily encroaching like a noxious vapor.

Tsukishima remained rooted, expression one of glacial detachment as he regarded you steadily. Something like pain flickered across your features before being swiftly smothered behind a mask of bland affront. With a final, ricocheting glance of...something Tsukishima couldn't decipher, you whirled on your heel and fled.

Only once the thud of the front door slamming echoed through the tense stillness did the younger Tsukishima exhale a low, ragged breath. His fingers unclenched from their white-knuckled grip on the towel as a menagerie of roiling emotion - bitter frustration, banked exhilaration, the lingering echoes of soul-searing obsession - seeped into the arid recesses of his psyche.

No matter how explosive the collision when your respective orbits intersected, Tsukishima knew he was caught in the inexorable pull of your gravity well. It was only a matter of time before he went spinning, wildly out of control, and dragged you down with him into the pitch black singularity of his fixation.

The weeks and months after your heated encounter were punctuated by stretches of strained silence, broken only by explosive bouts of argument and bitter recrimination that echoed through the Tsukishima household.

You still came around with decreasing frequency, but the casual warmth and easy rapport between you and Akiteru steadily decompressed into stiff, hollowed-out pantomimes of that former intimacy. Akiteru's brow furrowed in terse confusion whenever you and Tsukishima would inevitably gravitate towards each other, only for the atmosphere to buckle and splinter beneath the weight of barbed words and cutting rejoinders.

At the heart of the maelstrom, Tsukishima nursed his resentment and festering want like a raw, throbbing wound - poking and prodding at it in quiet moments until the searing flare of emotion was all he could comprehend. Nothing seemed to slake his hunger; no scalding confrontation or seething silence adequately diluted the sheer, galling compulsion he felt towards you.

It all came cindering down one evening when you appeared unexpectedly on the Tsukishima's doorstep looking resigned and conflicted. Tsukishima answered the door, trademark scowl firmly in place despite the electric frisson of awareness that shot through him upon finding you framed in the entryway.

"Not that I'm trying to impede on your busy schedule of antagonizing literally everyone around you, but I need to talk to Akiteru," you stated in a flat tone devoid of any real bite.

Tsukishima arched a querulous brow in response, gaze skimming insolently over you in a silent assessment. Whatever he found in your bearing must have piqued his interest, because his lips curved into a derisive smirk as he leaned casually against the door frame.

"He's out running some errands with mom earlier. But please, feel free to regale me with whatever trite nonsense is on your mind. I'll be sure to pass along the most banal details to Aki later."

A fractured exhale that might have been a mirthless chuckle ghosted through your lips at his mocking tone. "How gracious of you," you countered in clipped fashion before continuing in a lower register. "Actually, it might be better to talk to you first."

With that opening gambit, you brushed past Tsukishima into the entranceway, shoving down the fissures of unease that bloomed as his intense stare followed your clipped movements. Something about the air of grim resolution you carried set his nerves jangling faintly, a harbinger of upheaval to come.

You turned to face Tsukishima fully once inside, squaring your shoulders as if bracing for impact. He regarded you with poorly veiled curiosity despite the mask of sardonic aloofness he attempted to maintain.

"Well?" He prompted after a protracted moment of tense silence. "Do go on and enlighten me with whatever banalities have you seeking an audience."

You worried your lower lip for a beat, gaze skittering away from the weight of his stare before marshaling your resolve with a fortifying breath. When you spoke, the words emerged in a tumultuous rush.

"I'm leaving soon. Transferring to a university across the country for my Master's program." Your fingers twisted together fretfully. "Which means I won't be around much anymore to...whatever this is between us."

Tsukishima felt his breath stall in his chest as the implications galvanized in his mind. Leaving. Putting an entire continent's distance between your respective orbits. The prospect prompted a visceral spike of simultaneous relief and soul-rending loss that curdled like overspent adrenaline in his veins.

Perhaps sensing his unraveling composure, you barreled forward in a preemptive strike. "Look, I'm not naive enough to pretend there isn't...tension, or whatever you want to call it, between us. But it's gotten out of hand, Kei. It's unhealthy." You exhaled a shaky breath, expression broadcasting your internal discord. "I think some permanent distance might be what we both need to finally move past...this."

Your final syllables hung heavily between you, weighted with years of fraught history and the specter of unvoiced emotion. Tsukishima groped inwardly for some lifeline or anchoring retort, but his usually glib tongue felt expansively mired. For once, his vaunted intellect offered no scorching rebuttals or snide deflections - only a viscous, thunderous silence ringing with unspoken implication.

And in that sweeping void, the truth he'd spent the better half of a decade submerging beneath scathing petulance and obsessive fixation finally ruptured to the surface in a scalding torrent.

"You think I want this?" His voice emerged in a hoarse snarl edged with raw desperation. You started back half a step at the sheer venom saturating his tone, lips parting on an unvoiced query. But Tsukishima pressed forward inexorably.

"This maddening, inescapable compulsion that's haunted me since I was just a stupid kid? You honestly believe I asked for this relentless torment, this pathetic obsession that swallows every other facet of who I am?"

He was dimly aware of his harsh breathing punctuating each bitten-off phrase, of the erratic pulsing of his heartbeat like bellows stoking banked embers into a conflagration. But the self-disgust, the seething bitterness and all-consuming want roared to the forefront with cataclysmic force as he at last locked eyes with you fully.

"I didn't choose to become consumed by you!" He rasped, voice descending to a guttural rasp that seemed to reverberate through the scorched air between you. "To have every petty interaction, every insignificant encounter burned into my consciousness from the moment you seared your way into my existence!"

You gaped at him, lips shaping soundless words as turmoil washed across your features - quickly subsumed beneath burgeoning waves of pity and dawning comprehension. The aborted syllables shriveled on your tongue as he advanced a step, then another, until the static charge of simmering tension crackled like lightning just before the strike.

Your breath left you in a shuddering exhale as he towered over you, close enough now that the tangled knot of your respective scents - sweat and clean soap and the powdery hint of detergent - coalesced into an intoxicating amalgam. Close enough to make out the minute tremors wracking your frame as adrenaline flooded both your systems.

"You think I wanted this?" Tsukishima breathed again, voice fracturing on the lash as remorse and self-loathing parted like a rent veil to fully expose the caustic truth blistering through his veins. "To dissect and crave every infinitesimal part of you until the hunger gnawed like pestilence through my skin?"

In the slanted beams of dying sunshine filtering through the window, your complexion looked sallow and drawn - a sickly grey pallor that only threw the high sweep of your cheekbones and the plump bow of your lips into sharper relief. Gooseflesh rippled over the exposed canvas of your forearms as you stared back at Tsukishima, all bravado and derision bled dry as the weight of comprehension finally settled fully.

In that splintered tableau of anguish and reluctant revelation frozen between you, Tsukishima's entire universe whited out into the jagged fissures of truth he could no longer contain.

He closed the final, harrowing distance in a singular, insistent movement - stopping just shy of collision when you sucked in a panicked breath at his abrupt proximity. His chest rasped against yours with each frantic inhale as you pinned him with a look of pure, visceral trepidation.

But Tsukishima was beyond caring as realization cleaved through his consciousness like a ruinous storm finally breaking. For once, he eschewed any artifice of composure in favor of allowing the distillation of his absolute fixation to bleed freely into the roiling heat between your bodies.

"I don't want this," he reiterated, keen gaze burning paths over the rapid flutter of your pulse hammering beneath your jaw. "But I can no more resist the pull of you than a man can resist the inevitability of his own annihilation."

The words hung like a blasphemous mantra in the hair's breadth of electrified space separating your lips. Tsukishima felt the molten slide of your exhale feathering over the curve of his mouth as his name ghosted out in a sibilant whisper.

"Kei, I - "

Whatever feeble objection you may have offered lodged like shrapnel in your larynx as his hand lifted of its own volition. Calloused fingertips ghosted a blistering path from the graceful column of your throat, over the racing cadence of your pulse point, until coming to rest like a branding iron cupping the vulnerable hinges of your jaw.

You went preternaturally still, body locked in a statue's rigor as every molecule of air ionized between you like the portentous ether before a thermonuclear detonation. Perhaps sensing his fleeting window of opportunity, Tsukishima acted before what little remained of his sanity eroded completely.

In a movement more akin to an eclipse than any earthly burst of momentum, he slanted his mouth over yours - searing and inescapable as the electromagnetic shockwave announcing imminent oblivion. The last vestiges of his restraint and composure finally ruptured with the full-bodied jolt that lanced through him upon that first, cataclysmic point of contact.

This was it - the ruination of everything, the scorched-earth capitulation to his darkest compulsions and obsessive fixation. Years' worth of repressed hunger and bitter self-loathing and unbearable yearning finally sublimating into sheer, harrowing rapture as your lips parted compliantly beneath Tsukishima's insistent coaxing.

He drank in your shuddering gasp like a drowning man gulping blessed oxygen. The tang of salt and desperation mingled on his tongue as he surged deeper, robbed of any coherent thought save the all-encompassing fervor singeing every nerve ending. He mapped the slick, velvety recesses of your mouth with relentless focus for every precious second you allowed him this profane indulgence.

But all too soon, reality came slamming back into sickening clarity as you abruptly, vehemently wrenched yourself free. Pain lanced white-hot through Tsukishima's skull as his lower back impacted the wall in recoil from the force of your shove. He stood hunched and winded from the shock of impact for several disorienting heartbeats before raising his gaze to you.

You shook like a birch sapling in a gale, one hand pressed to your ravaged lips as if to trap the echoes of Tsukishima's rapacious violation against them. Anguish, outrage, confusion - a maelstrom of emotion held sway on your features before congealing into the ravaged mask of someone whose trust had been profoundly broken.

"I have to go," you bit out tremulously past the fingers still branding your mouth. Before Tsukishima could summon any articulation or plea for reprieve, you whirled on your heel and lurched towards the exit.

"Don't..." The feeble utterance strangled out of him, little more than a ghoul's rasp that you either didn't hear or chose to ignore. And then you were gone, the sound of the front door ricocheting shut echoing like the clanging finality of prison doors sealing fatefully behind you.

Tsukishima remained rooted and winded in the aftermath of his unraveling for an interminable stretch - wheezing agonized breaths past the anguished cataract of shredded self-control and remorse. When he finally unfurled from his hunched posture enough to properly look around, it was as if he were perceiving the world through an entirely new cosmological lens.

Where before every surface and familiar trapping of his childhood home had functioned as a mnemonic trigger for past memories of you, a radiant fixture seared into every insignificant crevice, it now produced only the ghostly echoes of that escalating tension finally reaching its terminal singularity.

The looming implosion of their relationship - of that inextricable tether binding him soul-deep to you - had officially commenced. And not through any external force, but by the sheer gravitational lensing produced by his own singularly depraved need to pull you into his orbit no matter the cost.

In that hollowing moment of ruination, Tsukishima's throat constricted around the cloying bite of truth and inevitability. There would be no salvaging this, no prospect of atonement or reconciliation now that the scorched, irradiated husk of his obsession lay in ruinous clarity before him.

You would leave - escape this harrowing gravity well before he could irrevocably drag you down into the depthless, all-consuming singularity of his fixation. And he would remain endlessly, inescapably haunted by the inextricable warp of your absence seared into the fabric of his existence.

Hell, he realized with harrowing finality, was not an external condition to transcend - but an inward, eternal torment wrought by his own hand and irredeemable actions.

a few years later

The rivulets of condensation trickling down the passenger window seemed to coalesce into the murky portent of gathering storm clouds on the horizon as Tsukishima stared unseeingly out at the passing scenery. An inexplicable sense of trepidation took root in the pit of his stomach, blossoming insidiously with each passing kilometer marker.

"You've been uncharacteristically brooding this whole ride," Akiteru's voice broke through the weighted silence, tone edged with faint bemusement. "Everything okay, Kei?"

Tsukishima shifted his gaze impassively to meet his brother's reflected in the glass before allowing it to skate away dismissively. "I'm fine. Just wondering why this desperately needed to happen on such short notice."

A humorless scoff filtered from the driver's seat. "Because you're the one who waited until practically the last minute to find housing for your graduate program starting in a few weeks."

A reasonable response, logically speaking. But Tsukishima's unease stemmed from a deeper wellspring of dread that had plagued him since Akiteru first proposed this impromptu "solution" to his living situation.

"I'm not an idiot, Aki," he groused, unable to completely disguise the petulance that crept into his inflection. "There's got to be more to this than some random person suddenly needing a roommate."

His brother was uncharacteristically silent for a protracted beats before releasing a longsuffering sigh. "Look, I know things have been...complicated, between you two - "

The words sparked like a flint igniting tinder in Tsukishima's psyche. His gaze snapped back to Akiteru, heavy-lidded eyes narrowing imperceptibly as comprehension crystallized with sinking inevitability. Of course it was you. It was always, inextricably you - forever the fixed point around which the most harrowing, inescapable forces in their universe orbited.

"Pull over," he bit out in a deceptively even tone that did nothing to mask the torrent of emotion swiftly cresting within him. His caustic rejoinder clearly took Akiteru by surprise, because his brother's brows pulled together in transparent confusion as they passed beneath the haloed sphere of a streetlamp.

"What? Kei, we're almost - "

"I said pull the fucking car over," Tsukishima repeated with much more heat saturating his words this time. The livid desperation gripping his chest precluded any coherent thought beyond the overwhelming urge to escape the increasingly claustrophobic confines of the vehicle before he succumbed to the panic swiftly metastasizing beneath his sternum.

To his credit, Akiteru must have sensed the urgency undergirding Tsukishima's insistence, because he tersely maneuvered them into the nearest vacant parking lot without further protest. No sooner had the gearshift clunked into park than Tsukishima burst from the car with enough force to make it shudder precariously in his wake.

The brisk night air did little to abate the asphyxiating sense of entrapment and dissonant realization that rolled over him in waves. Tsukishima paced several steps away, calloused fingers digging sharpened grooves into his already disheveled hair as he struggled to articulate the discordant maelstrom swirling through his mind.

"You can't honestly expect me to do this, Aki." He didn't mean for the words to emerge sounding quite so plaintive, tinged with the undercurrents of raw vulnerability he normally kept so rigorously submerged. An image of you, forever etched into Tsukishima's consciousness like a holy relic emblazoned on the backs of his eyelids, loomed in stark relief.

"I know things ended...poorly between you two back then," Akiteru ventured cautiously as he too emerged from the vehicle, lines of consternation creasing his brow. "But it's been years, Kei. You both could probably use some closure, or at least the chance to bury the past like rational ad- "

"Closure?" The syllable detonated from Tsukishima's lips in a strangled scoff edged with raw derision. He whirled to face his brother fully, not caring if the naked anguish he normally kept so ruthlessly restrained bled through now. Distantly, he registered his fingers trembling - an outward manifestation of the destabilizing architecture of his composure crumbling away.

"What part of being fatally obsessed and wanting to fucking ravish someone from the moment you first laid eyes on them screams 'rational adult' to you, Aki?" The words tasted like razors on his tongue in their excoriation, laid bare for the first time without artifice or deflection.

Akiteru's expression slackened with muted shock, lips shaping a soundless 'oh' as realization colored the slates of his comprehension with new, damning clarity. The heavy veil of silence suspended between them carried the portentous finality of a theater hush before the curtain rose on tragedy's climax.

When Akiteru finally mustered the wherewithal to respond, his tone was carefully modulated in the same hushed cadences one might use to coax a wounded animal free of its den. "I didn't...know it went that deep for you, Kei. That it evolved into something so...unhealthy."

Tsukishima shook his head minutely, an economic expenditure of movement that still somehow managed to convey the crushing weight of his despair and resignation. Of course Akiteru wouldn't have guessed at the true, festering depths of his fixation during those turbulent years of adolescence muddled by petulance and barely-leashed antagonism.

Tsukishima had gone to great lengths to camouflage the searing compulsion and unreality, burying it beneath cloaking layers of indifference and hostility. Even once he'd gained enough self-awareness to recognize the insidious obsession eating away at his faculties, he ruthlessly stifled and rationalized it - ruthlessly cauterizing those ragged, furtively vulnerable admissions of soul-deep need and unholy yearning behind rictus masks of disdain.

"Unhealthy doesn't even cover it," he rasped at last, unable to stifle his guttural scoff of mordant incredulity. "What I felt - what I still feel..." The admission emerged in a ragged exhale, abraded by the gravel layered across each vowel. His gaze skated away from Akiteru's stunned regard, instead fixing somewhere in the middle distance as his mind's eye painted the indelible, endlessly revisited portrait of your memory in aching clarity.

"It's like being cursed with an endless, unquenchable thirst," Tsukishima forced himself to continue in a brittle tone stripped of any artifice or evasion. "No matter how much you drink or how temporarily sated you become, your throat just opens up in new cracks and fissures, parched and ravenous as the desert itself."

His brother absorbed the hollowed confession in pronounced, weighty silence. Even in his periphery, Tsukishima noted the faint motions as Akiteru's throat struggled uselessly to formulate a reasonable response to such harrowing unvarnished truth. Finally, a hoarse utterance punctured the crackling stillness stretched taut between them:

"You never told me it was like that for you. That your...feelings were so intense."

The naked concern and regret woven through his brother's voice, like fine threads desperately stitching together the tattered, guttering remains of some newly revealed tragedy, prompted an unexpected stir of bitter derision to buoy Tsukishima's chest.

An acrid, joyless laugh spilled from his lips before he could think better of it, the pique of disparate emotion hardening the consonants until the abrasion rasped like an open wound. "How could I tell anyone?" He threw back, indelicate challenge glinting like shards of deadly silica in his stare. "Can you even begin to imagine confessing to feeling that...wretched hunger for your own brother's best friend?"

Akiteru flinched, the minute compression of his features accompanied by the aborted twitch of his fingers that clearly betrayed the instinctive urge to reach out instinctively - to attempt triage on the gaping disrepair laid bare before him. Tsukishima could practically envision the discordant static of thoughts and impulses rattling chaotically through his brother's psyche, could track the struggle inherent as Akiteru processed the full scope of Tsukishima's torrid, compulsive fixation.

The silence that echoed in the pause yawned between them like the oppressive density of a singularity, heavy with inexorable pull and scorching implication in equal measure. At last, Akiteru seemed to settle on his next overture, drawing forth all his faculties of earnest persuasion and fraternal care as he girded himself to proceed.

"Kei...I don't think I'll ever fully understand the scope or circumstances that created such intensity for you," he began carefully, each word acutely shaped with empathetic weight. "No one can rationalize compulsions like that born of unchecked emotion and...improper attachment pathways in the psyche."

Tsukishima narrowed his eyes against his brother's solemn, imploring stare, suddenly wary of where this speech seemed destined based on the familiar undulating cadences of Akiteru attempting to arbitrate harsh truths. But rather than demur or equivocate, his older brother pressed on unflinchingly.

"But this inability to let go, to find peace or detachment from those unbalanced impulses...it's only going to keep poisoning you, Kei. Destroying you and anyone else who gets caught in the blast radius, over and over in an endless cycle of turmoil."

A hairline crack spiderwebbed across Tsukishima's composure as the implication of his brother's words registered with the ruthless precision of a killing stroke. He felt his jaw flex in minute increments, a ticking chronometercharting the encroaching undertow of emotion threatening to drag him beneath its roiling surface once more.

"Are you suggesting," he began with meticulous slowness, tonnage of rebuke held in tense abeyance, "that I force myself back into her orbit just so I can...what? Overcome this, like some pathetic addict going cold turkey?"

Akiteru exhaled a sound that may have been a mirthless chuckle. "When you put it like that, it sounds-"

"Delusional? Self-destructive, even?" Tsukishima supplied archly, unable to completely mask the caustic edge of anger galvanizing beneath his sternum like a corrosive malignancy. "All I would accomplish is opening those fissures anew, Aki. Awakening that...relentless obsession all over again while offering up her peace of mind as collateral damage on the altar of my depravity."

Despite Tsukishima's raw confession about the depths of his fixation on you, Akiteru remained resolute.

"I hear what you're saying, Kei. Truly, I do," he said, squeezing Tsukishima's shoulder with a heaviness that belied the gravity of his next words. "But avoiding this situation, running from those compulsions...it's only going to leave you trapped forever."

Tsukishima opened his mouth to protest, rebuke already sharpened on his tongue. But Akiteru raised his hand to forestall the objection.

"You need to face this head-on. Confront those feelings, that obsession, in a healthy, controlled way - with me by your side." His brother's gaze burned with fierce conviction. "It's the only path forward to finally finding peace, Kei. You've been in this gravity well of torment for too damn long."

A hollowed pause stretched between them as Akiteru's decree hung suspended - a lifeline and tether all at once. Tsukishima felt it resonate through his very marrow, a tremulous clarion call commodified to the fractured, haunted planes of his psyche.

Finally, after what felt like an interminable, sanity-eroding instant, he managed a tight nod of grim acquiescence.

"Alright," he agreed in a rasp that scorched the tender abraded tissues of his throat. "I'll do it your way, Aki. For now..."

The last two words hovered replete with unspoken menace and conflict yet to come. But Akiteru's brilliant answering smile blazed like a gaseous nebula being kindled to stellar birth, bright with profound gratitude and steadfast determination.

"That's all I can ask, little brother. One step at a time."

The climb up the apartment building's stairs felt interminable, each step weighted with steadily mounting trepidation. Tsukishima couldn't deny the queasy roil of apprehension in his gut as he ascended behind Akiteru towards your door.

It had been years - years spent meticulously constructing psychic barricades and fortifying his defenses against the reckless undertow of obsession that had once threatened to drown him utterly. Yet now, at his brother's cajoling insistence, Tsukishima found himself being towed inexorably back towards the gravitational singularity of his darkest compulsions.

"You don't have to look so grim," Akiteru quipped over his shoulder, either sensing Tsukishima's disquiet or simply attempting to buoy the strained atmosphere. "This is a good thing, remember? A chance to finally exorcise those demons."

Tsukishima responded with a noncommittal grunt, gaze fixed forwards as they reached the landing. He could have gone his entire life without needing to "exorcise" the all-consuming fixation that had warped and contorted his psyche for so long. Better to plaster over those gaping psychic wounds and let them scar in isolation than to recklessly reopen them.

But Akiteru was nothing if not relentlessly optimistic about reshaping Tsukishima's mindset on this. His brother knocked briskly against the nondescript apartment door, then turned to flash an encouraging smile as the muffled sound of footsteps approached from within.

Tsukishima felt his jaw tense automatically as the deadbolt rattled and the door swung inward. And there you were, steadying presence and radiant energy blazing into view as if no time at all had passed.

It was like a surgically precise incision scoring through the meticulously maintained scar tissue encapsulating Tsukishima's obsession - disturbing its deceptive quiescence and allowing the tender, inflamed rawness to bleed freely once more. He drank in every nuance of your familiar features with a desperation bordering on offensive, hungrily cataloging the changes brought by the years apart.

Your eyes widened momentarily upon catching sight of him lingering behind Akiteru. Tsukishima watched as you visibly startled, then attempted to mask the reaction behind a perfunctory smile that didn't quite reach the shuttered wariness lurking in your gaze.

"Akiteru, hi! I wasn't expecting..." You trailed off, throwing a sidelong glance towards Tsukishima that felt like the audible screech of brakes on pavement. An awkward pause suspended between you all before his brother jumped into the breach.

"Yeah, sorry for springing this on you a bit last minute," Akiteru began amiably, using the tone of gentle persuasiveness that came so naturally. "There were some snags with Kei's living arrangements for school. I mentioned your place had an extra room, and, well..."

Tsukishima kept his expression carefully blanked as you pivoted towards him fully, searching his facade for any tells or clues. He could practicably sense the disquiet radiating from you in dense clusters, even diluted through years of separation and whatever attempts at cordiality still persisted between you.

"I see..." You said at length, letting the words unspool like a weighted sounding line dropped into fathomless depths. "Well, I suppose if it's not an imposition..."

"Of course not!" Akiteru assured with forced brightness, clearly sensing the hairline fractures spiderwebbing through the atmosphere. "Kei will be on his best behavior, I promise."

The subtle cant of your brow conveyed skepticism, but you regrouped with remarkable poise by pulling the door open wider in mute invitation.

"I'll just get the spare room ready then," you offered, tempering your tone to a bland neutrality that was somehow even more disquieting.

Tsukishima felt your sidelong stare pierce him like sharpened needlepoints as you brushed past towards the interior of the apartment. Despite his best efforts at emotional insularity, self-preservation screamed at him to hold your assessing gaze - to not flinch or compound the smoldering unease with avoidance.

In that fractional span before you turned away fully, Tsukishima saw it - the wariness, the quicksilver flash of emotions strained behind every pragmatic overture of civility. A panged, phantom echo of their adolescence and the caustic hostility that had ultimately incinerated any remaining bonds between you into smoldering ruin.

He sensed the first fissures splintering across the foundation of his defenses, hairline openings that would steadily widen and coalesce with every subsequent reunion with you. Already, like forgotten muscle memories rousing from dormancy, the compulsions were stirring within Tsukishima, stretching their atrophied wings against the constraints that had rendered them inert.

Akiteru clasped his shoulder as you retreated deeper inside, expression caught in that carefully modulated balance of reassurance and solemnity. A cursory exchange of platitudes untangled between the two brothers, words devoid of real meaning like dandelion gauze catching briefly on a razor's edge before fraying away into obscurity.

Tsukishima only managed a tight nod, the barely perceptible incline of his chin feeling like an already defeated concession and prelude to the coming cataclysm years in the making.

No matter how deep he attempted to bury them, how diligently he maintained those rigorous disciplines of restraint, the gravitational lensing distorting every aspect of his existence remained centered upon the implacable starseed of his fixation.

On you.

The first few weeks of cohabiting with you were...an exercise in calculated restraint for Tsukishima. A precarious dance of aptly sidestepping any situation that might rekindle the long-banked embers of his obsession into roaring new life.

He awoke each morning steeling himself against the temptations that awaited - the casual intimacies of sharing living space that rapidly shed their innocuous veneers to reveal newer, more pernicious labyrinths to navigate. Like the first faint wisps of your shampoo fragrance still clinging to the bathroom at dawn, inviting intrusive recollections of you damp and flushed from the shower's steam...or the maddening distraction of your sleep-tousled form passing by on the way to the kitchen as he tried vainly to focus on dissertation notes.

Small moments, inconsequential in their individual pacing. But they chipped away at Tsukishima's meticulously maintained indifference with every subsequent occurrence, eroding the opaque barriers sheltering him from his compulsions' caustic undertow.

You seemed equally ill-at-ease those first few weeks despite your courteous overtures and model-roommate behavior. An overeager brightness laced your casual greetings, punctuated by halting silences and sidelong glances that implied a persistent reserve layered beneath the arduous task of reacquainting as something adjacent to strangers.

But gradually, as the acrid sting of unfamiliarity dispersed like the lingering vapors in a cleared room, your reflexive masks of propriety and decorum towards one another began unraveling into more familiar patterns of behavior.

The loaded pauses became occupied by increasingly barbed small talk, snips of snide commentary and sardonic rejoinders clearly dredged from the muscle memories of your contentious adolescent rapports. Like wading out into a cristal-clear mountain lake, the vanguards of that old dynamic seemed to buoy you both further into familiar depths...even as the potential for something more turbulent and forceful churned in unknowable abyssal provinces.

The first time you outright argued over something utterly trivial - whether Tsukishima had intentionally swapped out all the TV's inputs just to be contrarian - it was like a sluice gate opening. A slipstream through which the long-sublimated currents of antagonism and pithy one-upmanship that had once characterized your relationship came rushing back in a cathartic torrent.

"- honest to god, it's like you derive sustenance from being an obnoxious ass sometimes," you groused heatedly from the opposite end of the sofa. The furrow of your brow and the slight flush riding high on your cheekbones lent your exasperation an intoxicating sort of vigor. "Is that superiority complex really so insatiable, or are you just doing it to get a rise out of me at this point?"

Tsukishima feigned an air of indolent nonchalance, lips twitching with the effort of containing his smirk as you ranted. Truthfully, he'd gone and rearranged the TV inputs on a whim, knowing it would eventually nettle you into this sort of delicious, heated reaction. He lived for moments like these - when the full force of your temper and spirited indignation were focused solely on him and he could bask, shameless and vampiric, in the raw energy of your presence.

"Hmm, could be a little from Column A, a little from Column B," he replied at length, letting his tone drip with layered provocation like honey from a cone. "I'll leave it up to your wildest fantasies and projections to unpack my motivations, though.."

The loaded suggestion woven through his flippant aside didn't go unnoticed. You scoffed loudly, rolling your eyes in a gesture of feigned disgust that couldn't quite disguise the full-bodied jolt his words produced. "And there's the charm I haven't missed in the slightest..."

Tsukishima's answering smirk took on an undisguised edge of satisfaction at having successfully thrown you off-kilter - even if only by a hair. "If you're hoping for an apology about the inputs, I have to disappoint. Remorse was one of the first things beaten out of me in childhood."

Your lips pressed into a mulish line, no doubt biting back a retort as Tsukishima's vaguely suggestive flirting ratcheted the tension up another notch. Good - let that uncertainty and trepidation creep in until he thoroughly occupied the forefront of your thoughts, just as you had for him all this time.

There was a gratifying sort of power in keeping you baited like this, angling to provoke that endearingly annoyed blustering that allowed Tsukishima to indulge his fixation under the guise of innocuous needling. Even better when you retaliated in kind, matching acidic wit for acidic wit until the furious sparring devolved into decidedly murkier waters.

The first time he upped the ante physically - casually invading your personal space to emphasize a point or provoking distractingly intimate contact as punctuation to a biting remark - you seemed to freeze up like a computer awaiting instructions. Tsukishima took perverse delight in watching your facial features cycle through a litany of conflicting micro-expressions: surprise, uncertainty, mild indignation, and a grudging hint of thrill.

This close, he could see the miniscule dilation of your pupils, the flutter of your pulse hammering beneath the vulnerable hollow of your throat as you battled not to betray the effect his proximity elicited. The warm, intoxicating blend of your natural scent combined with the ephemeral tang of clean sweat and fabric softener made Tsukishima's head swim.

"You're awfully quiet all of a sudden," he practically purred once the loaded tableau stretched on a beat too long. "No comeback about inappropriate boundaries, or overcompensating for a newly realized size deficiency?"

That managed to shake you from your overwrought trance, hackles rising as a full-body flush crept over your features. "You're vile," you spat in a commendable approximation of disgust as you recoiled from the intimate encroachment on your space.

But Tsukishima had seen the fracture lines, caught the stuttered nervous exhale betraying that whisper of atavistic response you fought so hard to suppress. And in that tiny erosion of your defenses, he glimpsed the horizon of new possibilities - an expanding frontier of ways to needle past your limitations and composure until you lay utterly exposed before him.

The simmering undercurrents of tension amplified dramatically in the weeks after that initial thawing of your antagonistic rapport. Each ensuing encounter seemed primed to shatter past mere playful banter and provocative innuendo, splintering into something rawer and electrifyingly unsafe.

Tsukishima leaned harder into the invasive little touches and suggestive asides, each one calculated to unnerve you further and provoke increasingly flustered reactions. Under the guise of sardonic indifference, he would casually ghost his fingertips over the bare nape of your neck while sliding past you in narrow hallways. Or let his hooded gaze linger with maddening emphasis anytime the shifting of your clothing afforded teasing glimpses of skin on display.

You cycled through various strategies to regain equilibrium - deflecting with sarcastic quips, feigning obliviousness, even blunt confrontation. But nothing seemed to deter Tsukishima or raze those escalating shockwaves of tension crackling like atmospheric static in his wake.

He cornered you one evening after you'd spent a long, frustrating day dealing with unruly group project members for one of your seminars. Exhaustion was writ plainly across the tense lines of your shoulders, the slight downturn of your lips as you shrugged out of your jacket and leaned heavily against the wall.

"Long day playing shepherdess to the intellectually insolvent masses?" Tsukishima's voice rolled smooth as velvet from the nearby shadows. You jolted upright with a stifled gasp, clearly not having registered his presence lurking in the dimness of the hallway.

"Fuck, you scared me..." you huffed out a shaky breath, willing your heartrate to descend from its panicked spike as Tsukishima's silhouette peeled away from the shadows with predatory grace.

"My apologies." The words dripped with heavy insincere as he came to lean against the wall a scant few inches away. Even in the low lighting, you could make out the glinting suggestiveness in his heavy-lidded eyes. "I'll be sure to make more noise announcing my skulking presence next time."

You tried to snort out a derisive scoff, to wall up behind a facade of irritation at his insinuations and proximity. But your voice emerged with a telling breathlessness that its own betrayal. "Wouldn't want to mistake you for other, more threatening predators lurking around, I suppose..."

Tsukishima loomed subtly closer, the heated undertones of his natural musk and the clean, flinty notes of his body wash filling the scant space between you. "Careful now," he rumbled lowly in a cadence that ricocheted straight down your spine. "I've been told I can be quite...dangerous when riled."

You swallowed hard, adam's apple bobbing convulsively as your fingers twisted in the fabric of your shirt. "Is that so? Dangerous how, exactly?"

Even in the dimness, you could trace the blatant path of Tsukishima's assessing gaze dropping to your restless fingers. To the subtle flex and release of your throat's musculature as you struggled not to betray the effect his voice and body heat radiating so brazenly had on you.

"Hmm, let's just call it 'volatile' to be on the safe side," he purred at last, drawing fractionally nearer until the proximity blurred the margins between your respective personal spheres. "Volatile enough that toying with it beyond certain limits has...consequences."

Your pulse thundered a rapid staccato against the vulnerable hollow of your throat as the implication settled over you like an intangibly oppressive weight. Edged into the narrow hallway, away from open sightlines, there existed only Tsukishima's radiant, inescapable presence and your rapidly shredding impulse control.

"Is that a threat?" You managed to rasp out at last in a poor mimicry of defiance. His aristocratic features pulled into a slow, dangerous smirk that had your pulse rabbiting anew.

"Just a friendly warning. I'd hate for either of us to get...burned."

The husky promise in his words hung spark-heavy in the charged space separating you. Your chests were nearly grazing with each feverish inhalation, close enough for Tsukishima to detect the staggered pitter-pat of your heartbeat under the sheen of exertion caused by the increasing heat and tension in the hallway.

His gaze locked unwaveringly with yours, relaying the same compulsive hunger searing away every rationalizing fortification in its path. That parallax between the forbidden whims rattling perilously in your respective minds shrinking to an infinitesimal membrane.

All it would take was the slightest breach - one sublimating burst of momentum to rupture that diaphanous film and send you both spinning, irrevocably, into that caustic event horizon of no return. Of surrendering to the inexorable gravities at long last and colliding with all the ruination and ferocious consumption that would entail.

You shifted slightly, the barest incremental adjustment of your balance that caused your thighs to brush ever-so-faintly against Tsukishima's. The contact was ephemeral as a soap bubble's caress...but enough to whiteout his vision with an incandescent flare of hungry provocation. Every nerve ending scoured raw by the suddenelectricity of that inconsequential stimulus.

Your exquisite inhalation shuddered through the infinitesimal margin between you like an orchestrated swell. Tsukishima's focus narrowed inexorably to the subtlest lexicon of reactions rippling across your features - the slight parting of your lips, the minuscule dilation of your pupils as twin mirrors brimming with the same shuddering mixture of curiosity and instinctual warning.

The dam was straining precipitously...here in this dark hallway, away from prying eyes or accountability, nothing remaining but to abandon the final, tattered constraints and give in fully to the smothering, annihilating compulsion singing with celestial rapture through his veins in that instant.

He could end this torturous hunger, slake the parched ache ravening through him for years with the final satiation of union, here and now. Strip away every barrier between you until the truth lay obscenely laid bare—

A door slammed in the distance, auditory shrapnel pulverizing the fragile tension condensed to ruinous density in the hallway. You jolted away from him like repelling magnets, the spell of whatever rapturous gravities had spooled you both towards that event horizon snapping with violent finality.

Tsukishima was left frozen in place, staring at the faint contrail of eddies still dissipating where you'd just occupied the same airspace as him. Molten displeasure curdled in his gut, simultaneously undercut by a parenthetical flicker of relief that neither of you had been the first to tip irrevocably over that precipice.

Not yet, at least. The restless drumbeat of his pulse still hammering with unspent keening to consummate those atavistic, compulsive urges was even clearer than before.

It was only a matter of time before even the most robust remaining safeguards were overcome in the face of such relentless gravities insisting on their conjoining. Tsukishima inhaled a steadying breath, brain already whirring with new strategies to engineer those subsequent pressures and fissures eroding your resistances.

No exit wound or discrete retreat remained to be found. Not when his existence had become this singularly obsessed vigil to bring yours under the sway of its eclipsing gravities once and for all.

The charged frisson of tension only grew more inescapable and stifling with each passing week. Every shared room, corridor, or overlapping routine now seemed to pulse with the same loaded potential - ripe for Tsukishima to manufacture new catalysts in eroding your restraint.

He mapped the contours of your routines and patterns with ritualistic focus, lying in wait like a singular predator isolating the most opportune moments to ambush and provoke reaction. Tsukishima took outrageous gambits to infringe upon your personal space, to lace every innocuous interaction with bristling undercurrents of something darker percolating beneath.

Like the night he prowled into the kitchen as you stood before the stove, idly stirring a simmering pot while swaying subtly to the distant thrum of music filtering in from the living room. You were absorbed in separate headspace, the slight crease between your brows suggesting deep rumination or merely zoning out after a long day.

Which made it all too tempting an opportunity for Tsukishima to disrupt.

He paused briefly just inside the kitchen entryway, drinking in the languid lines of your silhouette awash in the buttery warmth spilling from the oven's interior lights. The subtle but enticing curves of your body were accentuated by the casual lounge pants slung low on your hips and formfitting knit top that shifted hypnotically with each lazy twitch of the wooden spoon clutched in your hand.

Tsukishima's mouth went dry as he watched the gentle rise and fall of your shoulders accompanying each measured inhale and exhale. Every fiber of his being hummed in sympathetic frequency with the thrumming bassline pulsing through the floorboards under his bare feet. He advanced with predatory grace until looming just behind you, near enough to feel the heat radiating from your body in delicious contradiction to the sharp, cool tang of your soap and shampoo perfuming the space between you.

You startled faintly when he cleared his throat, the barest perceptible tightening of your shoulders before you slanted him a sidelong look of bemused inquiry. "I thought you were-"

"Out? Avoiding your incessant microwaved atrocities?" Tsukishima supplied archly, voice pitched low enough to thrum deliciously against the sensitive whorls of your inner ear. He took shameless satisfaction in the instinctive tick of tension feathering through your frame at his sudden proximity and realized just how exquisitely you'd underestimated the effect of him deliberately encroaching like this.

"That's not-" you shot back, aggrieved, before visibly swallowing back the retort and exhaling slowly in an attempt at regained composure. " ...I was just getting dinner ready, actually."

"And here I thought you were rehearsing for the 2024 Rhythmic Gymnastics Olympic trials," Tsukishima drawled in a voice gone syrupy with exaggerated innocence. His eyes followed the delectable sway of your hips as you turned back towards the stove, seemingly compelled into motion to diffuse the thick cloud of tension now billowing uncontained around you.

He took the opportunity to insert himself into your orbit, sidling smoothly past and forcing you to abruptly crane backwards to avoid his chest brushing against you. The tips of your wild hair tickled Tsukishima's jaw, sparked with residual static as he blatantly reached up and over your head to trail his splayed fingers along the underside of the upper cabinet.

Your breath went taut and shallow as he leaned in fractionally closer to feign examination of the cabinet's contents, and his heightened senses zeroed in on the way your pulse had begun to judder with uneven rapidity in the graceful column of your throat. So close now, the scintillating radiance of your warmth and presence blotted out all else in a gauzy, magnetizing vignette.

"What was it you were...looking for again?" You breathed out at last, a palpable tremor running through the question that hinted at the effort it took to maintain tenuous control over your composure.

Tsukishima hummed as if just remembering himself, gaze slipping down from the cabinet to burn a path over the delicious slopes and taut musculature of your backside mere inches from where he loomed. His fingertips slid across the underside of the cabinet towards you infinitesimally until he could feel the tingle of your body heat mingling with his own.

"Oh, nothing in particular," he finally purred, allowing the rasp of suggestion to bleed fully into every slurred syllable. "Just...enjoying the view."

You froze as if struck by lightning, every muscle gone taut and arrestingly still as the implication settled over you like an electrified miasma. For several protracted beats, the only movements between you came from your rapidly fluttering pulse hammering beneath the delicate sculpting of your jaw.

Tsukishima drank in the sight greedily, entranced by the way your pupils had blown wide, lips parting infinitesimally to pant out shallow, unsteady breaths. He could almost taste the roiling waves of confusion, arousal and consternation washing off you in acrid, mouthwatering bursts.

Just as he'd begun leaning in fractionally closer - operating on baser muscle intuition to revel in the effect of antagonizing those deepening fault lines in your restraint - the muffled whine of the apartment's front door opening startled you.

You wrenched away from his looming presence so violently that one of the cabinet doors caught your hip, drawing a pained hiss. And just like that, the rapturous bubble you'd both been so deliciously suspended in burst with harsh finality. Tsukishima was left trailing in your abrupt wake as you hurried from the kitchen without a backwards glance.

But he remained transfixed in place a few beats longer, rolling the echoes of adrenaline and electric tension through his consciousness like a saturated sponge. This was far from over - just another advance scout sent out to weaken your fortifications ahead of the next siege of his obsession.

The question was no longer if you would eventually capitulate to its gravitational insistence...but how utterly you'd crumble into decoherence once you at last surrendered control.

The encounters grew increasingly charged in the ensuing days, rippling with an undercurrent of unresolved provocation that threatened to crest at any moment. Tsukishima seemed to find new, increasingly brazen ways to insert himself into your personal space and routines.

Like the morning he ambled into the kitchen still disheveled from sleep - bare feet, rumpled sweatpants hanging precariously low on his lean hips, and a strategically unbuttoned shirt leaving little to the imagination. You were puttering around making coffee, back turned to him as he paused in the entryway to openly admire the view.

"Forgetting something?" His half-awake rasp still managed to drip with unmistakable suggestion. You jolted slightly before twisting to face him, brows raised in muted confusion until realization tinted your cheeks pink.

Tsukishima allowed his hooded gaze to drag pointedly over the thin cotton tank top you'd slept in - tight enough to leave little to the imagination this early before getting properly dressed. More specifically, the distinct absence of a bra's restrictive lines meant your nipples were on tantalizing display beneath the soft knit fabric.

"Didn't realize I needed a permit to be comfortable in my own home," you countered at last, proud of how little your voice wavered under Tsukishima's smoldering perusal.

One auburn brow inched higher in a deliciously provocative arch. "Who said anything about permits?" He let the words hang rife with insouciant curiosity before sauntering fully into the kitchen.

Tsukishima moved with exaggerated nonchalance, almost feline in his studied grace as he brushed past you to snag a mug from the overhead cabinet. You tensed imperceptibly as his arm extended over your shoulder, torso near enough that your bare upper arm grazed his chest through the vee of his unbuttoned shirt.

The friction of skin on skin was ephemeral, easily played off as incidental contact in such close quarters. But Tsukishima knew better - could sense the incongruous shiver feathering through you at his proximity, hear the uptick in your breathing's cadence.

He allowed one fingertip to skim up the curve of your bicep as he withdrew with his purloined mug, not even attempting to mask the smirk playing about his lips as you squirmed away bristling with delightfully ruffled indignation.

"Would you cut that out?" You shot across the kitchen, voice emerging several octaves too high to maintain an effective scolding timbre.

Tsukishima merely hummed a low, noncommittal response around the rim of his purloined mug, eyes already devouring the graceful arch of your back as you attempted to reassert some sense of normalcy by abandoning the coffee preparation.

Subtle as the provocation, he didn't miss the minor shudder transmitted through your frame at the simple rustling of fabric accompanying each minute shift of his stance. Tsukishima knew the effect he was having, could smell the coded pheromones of interest and uncertainty wafting from you in arousing summons.

All it would take was another indecorous push on the margins of propriety between you...

That opportunity arose mere hours later in another seeming happenstance encounter veiled beneath mundane routine. Tsukishima emerged fresh from showering, towel cinched low around his narrow hips while he used a second to scrub roughly at his damp hair. He detected your presence before even turning the corner into the hallway - heard the distinct cadence of your footfalls accompanied by equally familiar frustrated huffs.

By the time he rounded into view, you were distracted with wrestling your oversized laundry basket towards the utility closet at the far end of the hallway. Tsukishima didn't miss a beat, silently advancing to 'assist' without preamble.

You yelped at the sudden looming of his broad silhouette over your shoulder, hands gripping the handle of the basket until your knuckles shown pale. "Fuck, Kei - were you born without the ability to clear your throat or something?"

He allowed himself a low chuckle at your flustered gripe, the rumbling timbre rattling against the humid fog of air still clinging to his skin from the recent shower. "And have you go deaf from lack of usage? Where's the fun in that?"

You rolled your eyes at his flippant rejoinder, muscles visibly relaxing though your grip remained white-knuckled on the laundry basket's handle. Tsukishima took the opportunity to rake his molten stare overtly down the towel-shrouded length of his torso, gaze finally snagging on the juncture of terrycloth where it strained against his hips. When he lifted his focus back to you, you were frozen in unmistakable appreciation of the visual feast he'd offered.

"If you needed help wrestling that big load into the closet, you need only ask," Tsukishima purred, allowing a lascivious note to bleed into his tone conspicuously.

The effect was instantaneous - you flushed a vivid crimson, darting eyes quickly skating away from his as you scrambled for some sense of control over the encounter. "I've got it, thanks," you managed in a strangled tone pitched several decibels too high.

Rather than respecting your dismissal, Tsukishima took the opportunity to sidle in fractionally closer, near enough for his towel's hem to ghost a teasing caress over the distracted splay of your knuckles around the laundry basket. He watched with rapt fascination as a shudder rippled through your frame, gooseflesh erupting over the exposed canvas of your forearms until your every fine hair was on charged end.

"You seem awfully flustered this morning," he murmured against the vulnerable juncture of your jaw, near enough for you to feel the puff of his words' passage skating over your electrified skin. "Perhaps a cold shower would help...?"

Your breath hitched raggedly at the blatant suggestion, inadvertently allowing your shoulders to brush against the naked, fever-warm expanse of Tsukishima's torso as you attempted to put space between you. He seized the aborted movement as invitation to encroach further, hips canting minutely to press the lean V of his pelvis flush against the tantalizing flare of your backside.

The sudden, intimate contact obliterated whatever composure you'd been desperately clinging to like a scrap of cloth underfoot. In the same breath, you sucked in a harsh gasp, entire body going rigid as every synapse whited out into searing focus on that singular, scorching point of contact. Tsukishima took full advantage, bending fractionally to sluice the words directly against the heated hollow beneath your ear with hideous intimacy.

"I could give you some...private lessons on cooling down if you need them."

Your resultant groan punched from your diaphragm, strangled more from disbelief than outrage. He could sense the last tattered shreds of your propriety fraying by the second in the face of his unrelenting siege. But just as he prepared to deliver another barrage to fully breach your defenses, the muffled creak of the apartment's front door once again heralded an untimely interruption.

This time you reacted by shoving the unwieldy laundry basket away like a battering ram, toppling free without a second glance as you fled the explosive radius of Tsukishima's provocations. He watched you retreat with an impassive, heavy-lidded stare - utterly unbothered by the dispersion of clothing and sundry garments now littering the hallway and already plotting his next strategic offensive.

The antagonizing intimacy of each near-culmination left you shaken and destabilized. But far from dissuading Tsukishima's fixation, the withdrawal only whetted his compulsions to increasingly feverish heights with each cycle. He rode the high of those flirtations with ruinous gravities longer and longer, psyche buzzing like a live wire steadily burning away its protective shielding to expose the raw arcing filaments beneath.

That fissure between the polite fictions you clung to and the heaving, atavistic impulses rattling for release was widening. Every subsequent encounter fractured the remaining quarrystone just a bit more, slowly transforming your relationship into a gaping maw daring you both to pitch forward into its obscene, annihilating radiances.

So Tsukishima pressed on with increasing abandon, heedless of the devastation he courted. Every accidental-on-purpose brush of heated flesh on flesh, every suggestive murmur or remark purposefully engineered to send your thoughts into frenzied tailspins...he wielded them as agents of chaotic erosion. Turbulent eddies and searing plumes blasted relentlessly against the remaining integrity of your defenses until only sheared-away remnants remained.

All while Tsukishima waited, every particle accelerated to maximum catalyzing potential, for the inescapable moment of criticality where you could no longer withstand the forces arrayed against your restraint. Where you were reduced to ground zero, a supernova singularity from which there could be no outgassing or reconstitution - only absolute decoherence and surrender to the annihilating truth of what ravened between you.

A late spring storm rolled in unexpectedly that evening, thunder rumbling ominously as dark clouds opened up and unleashed torrential rain. The storm's fury showed no signs of abating as the hours ticked by. The dreary tattoo of rainfall eventually lulled into a static blanket of white noise surrounding the apartment.

You meandered into the kitchen at one point, abandoning all pretenses of productivity in favor of mindlessly rummaging through the cabinets. A handful of stray snacks and your favorite battered paperback provided a meager salve against the oppressive restlessness taking root.

By the time you settled back in the living room, periodically breaking from your reading to stare vacantly out the rain-lashed windows, cabin fever had well and truly set in. You barely registered the bathroom door opening and closing, or the faint pad of footfalls approaching until Tsukishima cleared his throat from the entryway.

You startled, nearly dislodging the nest of blankets cocooned around you as you twisted to face him. A lick of heat blossomed low in your belly at his utterly distracting state of dishabille - shirtless and tousled from the shower, worn sweatpants hanging perilously low on his lean hips.

"You just going to pretend to read all night, or...?" Tsukishima's words trailed off in that suggestive lilt he seemed to wield solely to unhinge you. You swallowed hard against the aridity prickling your throat.

"Well, this would be a lot more exciting if we could have anticipated being trapped inside together," You heard yourself replying in a tone bordering on breathless despite your best efforts at maintaining nonchalance.

One corner of Tsukishima's mouth curved in a devilish smirk. "Who says it has to be boring?"

You blinked rapidly, frozen in place as he prowled closer with that maddeningly unhurried, predatory gait of his. Your chest rose and fell in shallow bursts, unconsciously telegraphing the spike in your pulse when he sank onto the sofa next to you.

"Relax," he murmured, voice gone low and rumbly in a way that sparked exquisite little frissons all along your limbs. "If you get any more tightly wound, you're liable to spontaneously combust."

The blatant suggestion in his tone triggered a fresh blossoming heat across your collarbones. You licked your lips instinctively, hyper-aware of Tsukishima's bedroom-eyed stare tracking the movement with unmistakable interest.

"Maybe I could use a distraction, then," you managed in a tone aiming for arch nonchalance but emerging husky and tremulous instead.

Tsukishima hummed deep in his chest, leaning in infinitesimally closer until you could make out the feathery whorls of individual lashes framing those molten eyes, the dusting of faint freckles scattered across his sculpted cheekbones.

"I can think of a few options for that..."

The low, velvety rasp of his words catalyzed a cascading frisson reaction along your nerves. Your gasped inhale wavered precariously close to a whine of surrender as the heated miasma of Tsukishima's proximity shrouded you in intoxicating totality.

He dipped nearer still, one calloused fingertip trailing an incendiary path up the exposed slope of your shoulder until it curved tantalizingly around the base of your throat.

The molten gravity between you yawned and stretched taut as a singularity's event horizon as your gazes met and mingled - all the riotous impulses and shredded refrains of propriety temporarily abandoned to the upswell of that heated, eclipsing tension.

Tsukishima's lashes hooded heavily as his stare dropped to linger meaningfully on your parted lips. You felt your own eager inhale stutter in your lungs as he leaned the final incremental distance separating you and—

The abrupt squall of your phone's ringtone pierced the rapturous bubble of hushed tension with all the delicacy of a gunshot, sending you both flinching violently apart in a mutual full-bodied startle.

You scrambled to untangle yourself from the cocoon of blankets while Tsukishima surged to his feet, jaw clenched and nostrils flaring in mingled aggravation and unfulfilled yearning.

"You'd better get that," he bit out gruffly before stalking away in a tightly-leashed whirlwind, already shrugging into a discarded shirt as he retreated down the hallway.

You stared after his abrupt exit for several long, thunderstruck beats before fumbling for your phone to end the wretched interruption. Outside, the rain still pelted with unremitting force against the windows in a dreary percussive counterpoint to the furious pounding of adrenaline roaring between your temples.

Alone once more, you sank jelly-legged back onto the couch, thoughts whirring with chaotic possibilities and unvoiced recriminations. Relief at avoiding...what, precisely, you couldn't identify. Frustration, resentment that the moment between you had shattered so irrevocably. And underneath it all, a deeper, hungrier current that no amount of conscientious denial could quell entirely.

Try as you might to restrict its momentum, the inescapable gravities catalyzing between you had grown too immense and intrinsically locked to be denied indefinitely. It was only a matter of time now before they overwhelmed the final eroding vestiges of your restraint entirely.

The apartment felt thick with pent-up energy in the aftermath of that aborted, almost-intersection. An overcharged miasma clung to every room, every mundane occurrence between you now freighted with unvoiced implications.

Tsukishima grew increasingly emboldened in those ensuing days, needling you with suggestive remarks and invasions of personal space that bordered on the obscene. You responded with curt rejoinders or stony silence, but the effect was like dousing a raging wildfire with a garden hose's dribble.

He crowded you against the kitchen counter one evening as you washed dishes, chest brushing your back with each inhale until your hands stilled beneath the soapy deluge.

"Need some help?" The seductive rasp filtered across the sensitive whorls of your ear, making you shudder involuntarily. "These dishes are looking...utterly filthy."

Before you could formulate a retort or extricate yourself, Tsukishima's hands slid around your waist in a purposefully artless mimicry of an embrace. His palms skated over the taut planes of your abdomen, smearing trails of soapy water as he leaned in fractionally closer until his lips disturbed the diaphanous veil of your hair.

"I do so love getting my hands...dirty," he practically purred, the resonant undulations of his voice reverberating through you with exquisite intimacy.

You froze utterly, knuckles gone bloodless around the ceramic edges of the plate clutched between your fingers. Every measured inhalation you drew only stoked the bonfire of Tsukishima's proximity raging higher and hotter around you.

Each hitched breath fanned the flames of your indecision as warring instincts - to flee or surrender, remain locked in this smoldering stasis or detonate the fuse between you entirely - battled for dominance.

Tsukishima seemed to sense the infinitesimal tremors rattling through your frame in those charged moments, tactician that he was. His calloused hands spanned your midriff possessively, kneading at the tension barricading your abdomen in wordless invitation.

When you remained immobilized in his orbit, petrified equally by terror and temptation, he allowed the exhalation of a rapturous sigh to scorch every previously unexplored hollow and curve of your exposed skin.

"Look at me," he commanded at last in that same ruinous timbre that stripped you of rational capacity.

You complied sluggishly, as if wading through atmospheric densities double their usual weight, until your unfocused gaze locked with the blown-wide expanses of Tsukishima's irises.

His stare smoldered with undisguised hunger, burning paths over your parted lips and the rapid fluttering of your pulse point before searing back to meet your own glazed regard. You felt utterly hypnotized in that annealing instant, magnetized towards this singularity of eclipsing provocation.

Tsukishima didn't so much lean in as allow the event horizon to gradually envelop you both, each synapse and loaded inhale telescoping further into the same devouring radiance. He cradled your nape in one broad palm, anchoring you inescapably as his mouth angled to collision upon yours with finality of celestial bodies yielding to intractable gravities.

Victory and resignation burned in equal measure in his stare, as if daring you to be the one to extinguish this final infinite breath separating you from sating the compulsions simmering for far too excruciatingly—

A thunderous barrage of knuckles at the front door splintered the raptured silence into shards. You gasped against the searing proximity of Tsukishima's lips, every nerve ending jolted back to momentary lucidity. He uttered a guttural rasp of pure frustration, eyes squeezing shut as if willing away this latest violation.

But the hammering at the entryway persisted with escalating force and urgency, finally severing the spell suspending you both in that singular, transcendent stasis. Tsukishima wrenched himself away with visible effort, backpedaling several paces as you remained rooted in place and trembling.

The turbulence from his abrupt withdrawal left a roiling wake of eddies disturbing the humid atmosphere around you. You struggled to recapture your equilibrium, senses still hazy with unsated yearning and the acrid tang of almost-completion.

Tsukishima stalked towards the front entrance in a tightly-leashed whirlwind, movements telegraphing his agitation through every taut line of musculature. Just before wrenching the door open, he slanted you one final inscrutable look from beneath hooded lashes - one final lancing intimation that this wasn't over by any means.

Not until all veils were sundered and both of you yielded to the compulsions wheeling you ever closer to that searing event horizon of no return.

Tsukishima returned to the apartment that evening utterly drained from a marathon study session at the library. The weight of fatigue clung to his bones like full-body restraints as he fumbled with his keys, thoughts fuzzy and focused solely on collapsing into bed for a few hours' reprieve.

So when the sounds of muted conversation and low laughter filtered through from inside, he felt the first faint prickle of alertness pierce his exhaustion-fogged senses. You hardly ever had visitors over besides Akiteru, which meant—

A fresh wave of wakefulness doused Tsukishima as he quietly pushed through the door to find you nestled on the couch...accompanied by another man he didn't immediately recognize. You were angled towards this stranger with your full attention, body cant subtly inward as you spoke in hushed, impassioned tones, the two of you leaning unconsciously ever-closer with each conspiratorial murmur.

A muscle went taut along Tsukishima's jaw as he registered the intimate tableau before him - the way the man's broad shoulders hunched eagerly towards you, that undisguised spark of naked interest glinting in his heavy-lidded assessment of your features. Setting the scene like another planet abruptly shifting into Tsukishima's established orbit without permission.

He cleared his throat once, a percussive bark that shattered the hushed ambiance and had you both jolting upright like repelled magnets across a forcefield. The man whipped around with a look of surprise rapidly melting into sheepish discomfiture as you straightened, kneading the knotted throw pillow in your grasp like a lifeline.

"Kei! You're, uh—you're back sooner than I expected," you stammered after a loaded pause. The tips of your ears flushed slightly under Tsukishima's bland, assessing stare. "I was just...catching up with an old friend from undergrad. We haven't seen each other in ages."

Your eyes pleaded guilelessly for some sense of normalcy, but Tsukishima felt the riptide undertow of something distinctly possessive and unslakeable roaring to the surface within him. His gaze sliced incisively to the stranger sitting just a hair too intimately close to you.

"I see. Well, I didn't mean to interrupt your...catching up," he intoned at length, each precisely shaped syllable dripping with the confrontational lilt of challenge. The look he slanted at the other man may as well have been semaphored in neon: This ends now.

To the guy's credit, he seemed to grasp the perilous undercurrents tensing the atmosphere with a clarity that escaped your well-meaning obliviousness. After throwing an inscrutable, questioning look your way that garnered no reassurance, he stood abruptly and made a show of straightening his clothes.

"You know what, you're absolutely right. I've probably overstayed my welcome tonight," he addressed both of you in a tone striving for diplomacy, even as his eyes danced between Tsukishima's smoldering countenance and your deepening frown of consternation. "Rain check on the rest of the reminiscing? It was...great catching up."

You opened your mouth, undoubtedly to protest his abrupt exit, but Tsukishima seized control of the situation before it could spiral chaotically out of control.

"Of course," he interjected smoothly, stepping aside just enough to allow the man to skirt a wide berth past his obstinately planted form. A significant look passed between them - bristling with unspoken reproach and sizing up - before your friend finally made his exit.

The door had barely clicked shut before Tsukishima turned his gimlet focus towards you fully, already advancing into your space like an unstoppable force guided by irrefutable trajectories.

"Making new friends in my absence?" The question emerged in a low rasp, knife-edged with barely restrained umbrage that lent it a vaguely mocking quality. "That's either impressively brazen...or cruelly negligent of you."

You blinked up at him owlishly from your seat on the couch, hands still worrying that hapless throw pillow like a discarded stress ball as Tsukishima's scorching presence buffeted you from all sides.

"Kei, what is your problem?" You fired back at last, sounding more petulant than convincingly indignant as he loomed over you in mounting displeasure. "He really was just an old friend. We didn't—"

"Didn't what?" Tsukishima cut you off with biting false-geniality. "Put on a salacious little show of false intimacy where I could clearly see how eager he was to rekindle old flames? Force me to witness how withdrawn and rapturous your attention was while tucked so close together?"

"That's not fair," you protested, beginning to push upright from the couch cushions only to have Tsukishima's broad palms bracket the rumpled fabric on either side of your head – effectively caging you in place as he prowled even nearer.

You swallowed hard, suddenly dizzy from the electrifying proximity of his presence and the scorching recrimination skating through his gimlet stare. Tsukishima cocked his head fractionally to one side, assessing you with such intensity it was like being systematically disrobed layer by layer.

"Do you even realize what it does to me?" He breathed at last, the hushed rasp of his words rippling intimately against the sensitive whorls of your inner ear. "Seeing you so openly beguiled by another, being dismissed from your undivided attention?"

He shifted infinitesimally closer, near enough for you to feel the searing thermals of his body heat and track the tangled riot of individual lashes framing each heavy-lidded stare. Tsukishima's voice had taken on a smoky, nectar-thick resonance that seemed to burrow straight down into your innermost nexuses of instinct and longing.

"Kei, I..." Whatever feeble protestation you attempted to summon fractured on your tongue as he dipped even nearer still. Tsukishima's nose skated a scorching, featherlight path along the line of your jaw until his mouth hovered a scant hairsbreadth from yours - so perilously close that you could taste the arid exhalations gusting from between his parted lips.

"Every fiber of my being rails against the mere notion of being an afterthought in your attentions," he confessed in a spine-tingling purr. "Of having to tolerate another encroaching on...what's mine."

The naked possessiveness saturating that final rasp stripped you of any remaining pretenses of composure. You could only manage a muted whimper from somewhere in the back of your throat as the full weight of Tsukishima's compulsions - his long-smoldering fixation you'd denied for far too long now - reverberated through you in rapturous detonations.

You sensed his gravitic tides enveloping you, every forbidden longing suddenly compressed into hyper-focused singularity between the searing, infinitesimal proximity of your bodies. Tsukishima searched your wide, unfocused stare for any hint of rejection or objection and found only stunned, reciprocal rapture gazing back.

"Tell me you don't want this as badly," he growled with low, dangerous timbre. "Look me in the eyes and convince me you haven't imagined surrendering to inevitability as completely as I have every torturous second of denying it..."

He sealed the minuscule gap separating you in one blistering rush. Tsukishima's mouth slanted hotly over yours with all the ruthless, unyielding insistence you'd come to expect but could never have braced for. The first shocking contact detonated like a lightning strike, shorting out any lingering mental processes apart from sheer visceral conflagration.

You shuddered full-bodily into the onslaught, hands convulsing in the cushions as his palms cradled your jaw to hold you immobile. Tsukishima surged even more impossibly nearer, his calloused palm rasping up the sensitive juncture of your throat until his fingertips found purchase in the dense silk of your hair.

Within seconds you were pliant and keening against him, lips parting wantonly on a gasping whine as he slanted his mouth across yours with relentless, devouring precision. The first exploratory swipe of his velvet tongue left you utterly unraveled, quaking with full-bodied devastation as Tsukishima mapped every searing nuance of your intimate geometries.

He allowed no quarter or reservations to persist - only the full, immolating truth of his compulsions made exquisitely and irrefutably manifest against the plush glide of your lips, the wet velvet of your mouth yielding beneath the onslaught of his attentions.

Every tremor that ripped through you seemed to lance Tsukishima with renewed fervency. He groaned, low and harrowing, as your eager fingers fisted spasmodically in the fabric of his shirt, seeking any sort of anchoring purchase amidst the bewildering, rapturous upheaval.

You'd never experienced anything like this - this level of sheer totality and berserker focus distilled into physical expression. It was as if Tsukishima were searing the incontrovertible truth of his fixation into your very bones using only his lips and tongue and ceaseless, gnawing hunger.

Years of repression and denial and circuitous gravities slowly compounding into critical mass between you abruptly detonated into coalescent bliss. This ravenous claiming was equal parts absolution and desperate, lurid gratification of compulsions far too immense to subdue any longer.

You felt the dense warmth of his palm skating searingly down your torso, bunching and rucking your clothing with each searing glide. The plaintive, wrecked sound you managed to produce at the sudden intimate contact only seemed to further unleash the rampant undertow of Tsukishima's ardor.

His answering growl rumbled straight through your hazes and nexi, reverberating across every shockwave of awakened nerves and nerve endings. Some distant part of you felt subsumed entirely under the rising tide of that overwhelming onslaught, relinquishing the last shards of agency and coherence to simply experience rapture in its most ruinous, annihilating distillation.

You surrendered utterly in that moment - mind, body, and soul catalyzed to a singular axis point devouring every permutation of reality save for the obscene, unholy revelations of Tsukishima's mouth and hands searing reality anew into your senses.

This was what you had both been hurtling towards for far too long, stubbornly resisting the cosmic insistence of fate and willful denial despite inevitability's inescapable gravities. With an inarticulate keen of abject surrender, you canted your jaw and yielding to the delirium of that blissful, eternal singularity at last.

Tsukishima, his obsession reified into living religion, was more than willing to meet you on that ecstatic boundary and usher you both fully across the divide.

The moment your lips parted in surrender, Tsukishima surged forward with the ferocious insistence of a man finally allowing years of repressed starvation to run rampant. His mouth slanted hotly over yours with lurid, open-mouthed fervor, tongue spearing past seam of your lips to map every searing plane of velvet within.

You keen softly at the blinding intensity, fingers convulsing in the rumpled fabric of his shirt as you pulled him bodily closer - suddenly desperate to extinguish any last vestige of space between your frames. Tsukishima growled his approval against your lips, hands spanning your jaw to tilt your head into the perfect devouring angle as his hips canted forward purposefully.

The blatant press and grind of his cock against your lower abdomen catalyzed a full-body shudder. You arched instinctively against the maddening friction, soft whimpers punching from your throat with each subsequent roll of Tsukishima's hips against your own. He swallowed those needy keens hungrily, tongue plunging with filthy precision to entwine and taste every nuance of reciprocation from you.

Your skin felt electrified, every fine hair prickling with rapturous sensitivity in Tsukishima's overwhelming radiance. You clutched at the cut slopes of his shoulders like a lifeline, mind hazing out into dissociative planes of ecstasy with each languid swirl and thrust of his tongue against yours. The dizzying intimacy of his ravenous mouth and roving hands mapping possessive paths across your shuddering curves was utterly obliterating.

Just when you felt the last tattered remnants of oxygen deprivation graying the corners of your consciousness, Tsukishima relented fractionally - dragging his lips in a scorching, openmouthed trail along the rigid tendons of your neck. You gulped in precious gulps of air, everything zoning into hyper-focused clarity on the heavenly ministrations of his mouth mapping your thundering pulse point before continuing up to lave the sensitive basin beneath your ear.

"Been dreaming of this..." he confessed in a voice guttered to smoke and honey. "Of finally having you splayed and breathless beneath me."

The barefaced carnal imagery and undisguised compulsion in his tone punched a whine from deep in your chest. Somewhere through the synaptic whiteouts of pleasure, you managed a tremulous plea for more of that undiluted truth to be scorched into your awareness.

Tsukishima growled in savage gratification, hips snapping forward again to grind deliciously against you as his mouth trailed liquid infernos across your cheekbone back towards your lips. "Had to watch you for years unconscious of how badly I wanted this...needed you laid out and whimpering for me."

Your resultant moan obliterated any lingering attempt at composure. He took ruthless advantage once more, tongue spearing past your parted lips to taste the uninhibited rapture. You surged against him mindlessly, fingers spasming into the tense cording of muscle spanning his back as your senses grew whited out in ecstasy.

Tsukishima shifted his weight to fully bracket you into the couch, the blissful cradle of his hips slotting obscenely against your own as his calloused fingers traced paths of ruination everywhere they roamed. You were malleable putty in his hands - liquefied by desperation and the annihilating surrender to compulsions held at bay for far too excruciatingly long.

Your clothes were rapidly becoming an obstacle, the fabric rucked and constricting until you felt the full force of Tsukishima's blazing touch against the delicate planes and curves of your bare skin. You writhed instinctively beneath him, desperate to be freed of the confines and fully submerged in the molten radiance of his body.

Tsukishima seemed to intuit your desire with the preternatural synchronicity he exhibited on the court. In seconds, his calloused palms had skimmed beneath your shirt and peeled it deftly overhead, tossing it carelessly aside as he drank in the sight of you half-clothed and quivering.

"Perfect..." He rasped, eyes darkening in appreciation as they raked over your bare chest and stomach, the peaks of your nipples stiffening beneath his ravenous gaze. Tsukishima's tongue darted across his lower lip, and the gesture was so sinfully enticing that you couldn't help but whine low in the back of your throat.

That seemed to spur him into action, and his hands were suddenly everywhere. Your pants and underwear disappeared in a whirlwind of movement, and then you were spread bare beneath him. The way he looked at you - the unmitigated heat and desire and raw possession gleaming in his stare - made you flush with arousal all over.

Tsukishima's hands were everywhere, mapping every exposed plane and curve with an intensity that left you gasping. His touch was searing, callouses rasping deliciously over the sensitive peaks of your breasts and nipples, making you arch into him.

"Please..." you gasped, already beyond words, beyond anything but the need to feel him against you, inside you. "Please, Kei..."

That seemed to be all the permission he needed. His eyes flashed with dark hunger, and his hands were moving to push his own pants and underwear off. You couldn't help the soft cry that escaped you as his cock sprang free, thick and heavy and leaking precum.

Tsukishima wasted no time, his fingers slipping between your thighs to find you dripping for him. You whined, bucking against him, desperate for more friction. His fingers slid inside you, fucking into you with a steady rhythm that had you writhing against him.

You could feel the molten, inescapable radiance of Tsukishima's stare tracking every twitch and flutter of expression, every involuntary jerk and shiver of response in your frame. He seemed intent on memorizing each subtle shift and hitch of rapturous torment rippling across your features, mapping the exact points that reduced you to keening, incoherent pleas.

His fingertips curled inside you with expert precision, stroking and teasing and stretching you open until you were a shuddering, moaning mess. You couldn't even think, could only feel, as the searing compulsion to be fully, utterly ravaged by Tsukishima's ravenous attentions obliterated all other concerns.

Tsukishima watched you come undone with a hunger that made your head spin. His eyes were dark and intense, drinking in every inch of you, every shudder and gasp. His gaze was nearly as palpable as his touch, setting your nerves alight.

"You're so beautiful like this..." he murmured, his voice ragged with lust. "All laid out and trembling for me, begging for my cock."

His words sent another wave of arousal through you, and you could feel yourself clench around his fingers. Tsukishima groaned, and his cock twitched, precum beading at the tip. You ached to taste him, to feel him inside you, filling you.

"Kei, please," you gasped, reaching for him, needing him. "Please, I need you, I need you inside me."

That seemed to be all the convincing he needed. Tsukishima withdrew his fingers, leaving you aching and empty for just a moment before his cock was pressing against your entrance. You moaned, arching into him, and he pushed inside with a groan.

The feeling of him inside you was almost too much. You were already so close, and the sensation of him filling you was enough to send you over the edge. But you wanted more, wanted to feel him move, to see him fall apart.

"Please," you managed, voice little more than a breathless whine. "Move, Kei, please, I need you..."

With a low growl, he began to move, thrusting into you with deep, powerful strokes that had you crying out with each one. His cock filled you perfectly, hitting every spot that made you see stars. You clung to him, desperate for more, needing more.

The sounds of pleasure falling from Tsukishima's lips were absolutely sinful. You could feel his gaze raking over you, watching you fall apart beneath him. His pace increased, driving into you harder and faster. You could feel your climax building, each stroke sending you closer and closer to the edge.

Tsukishima's fingers tangled in your hair, tugging your head back to expose the delicate line of your throat. His teeth grazed the sensitive skin, and you moaned, arching into him. His hips snapped forward, his cock hitting that perfect spot inside you over and over.

"Come for me," he growled, his voice raw with lust. "I want to feel you come, to feel you fall apart for me."

That was all it took to send you careening over the edge. You came hard, crying out his name as your orgasm crashed over you in wave after wave. He fucked you through it, prolonging your pleasure until you were a trembling, incoherent mess beneath him.

As your climax subsided, Tsukishima's movements became more erratic. He was close, you could tell, his breathing ragged and his thrusts losing their rhythm. You wrapped your legs around him, pulling him deeper, urging him on.

"Come for me, Kei," you managed, your voice barely above a whisper. "Come inside me, I need to feel you, please..."

Those words seemed to push him over the edge. With a groan, he thrust into you one last time, his cock pulsing as he spilled inside you. You clung to him, riding out his orgasm with him.

As the aftershocks faded, he collapsed against you, his body heavy and warm. You wrapped your arms around him, holding him close. You could feel his heart hammering against your chest, and his breath was hot against your neck.

You could have stayed like that forever, wrapped up in each other, but Tsukishima's weight was becoming uncomfortable. After a moment, he shifted, pulling out and rolling onto his side. His eyes were still dark, but now they were also soft, and his expression was unreadable.

"Are you okay?" His voice was low and gentle, and the tenderness in it made your heart ache.

You nodded, reaching up to cup his face in your hand. He leaned into the touch, and you could feel the tension in his body melting away.

"I'm perfect," you whispered, leaning up to press a kiss to his lips. He kissed you back, slow and sweet. "Absolutely perfect."

Tsukishima's answering smirk was infuriating and triumphant and insufferably smug, but he gathered you up in his arms and pressed a searing kiss to your temple nonetheless. The weight of him surrounding you, anchoring you to the here and now, felt like absolution and promise and utter perfection all rolled into one.

In the afterglow, there was no need to dissemble or deny the seismic magnitude of what had just transpired between the two of you. Tsukishima's arm draped possessively across your waist, his fingertips tracing idle, sensuous patterns across the smooth expanse of your abdomen as he pressed a drugging kiss to the nape of your neck.

"Do you regret it yet?" His murmured inquiry was a smoky rumble, laced with equal parts wry humor and uncharacteristic uncertainty.

"Never," you responded immediately, no hesitation or equivocation clouding your response. You craned your head back to lock gazes with him, allowing the full force of your conviction to bleed through in your stare.

A smile curled at the corners of Tsukishima's lips - the rare, genuine kind that made your heart skip a beat. He pressed another kiss to the hollow of your throat, his teeth grazing the tender skin just enough to make you gasp.

"Good," he purred, sounding distinctly self-satisfied as he curled his body possessively around yours. "Because I've been waiting years to do that...and I'm nowhere near done."

You laughed, lightheaded and giddy and utterly smitten. This had certainly escalated far beyond any realm of your comprehension, but Tsukishima's ardent compulsions had been so thoroughly fulfilled that he seemed willing to let the past - and whatever might have transpired between you and him tonight - fade into the ether of the future.

And when Tsukishima's mouth slanted across your lips in another searing, devouring kiss, you found that you really, truly couldn't bring yourself to care about anything beyond this blissful, annihilating singularity of reality.

You awoke the next morning, deliciously sore and tangled in Tsukishima's embrace. A lazy smile tugged at your lips as you basked in the warmth of his sleeping form. Memories of the previous night's passion made a pleasant shiver run down your spine.

A sharp rap at the door made you both jolt awake. Tsukishima frowned as the insistent knocking continued. You quickly gathered the blanket around your bare form as he tugged on a discarded pair of shorts and stalked over to answer it.

The door swung open to reveal Akiteru, a cheerful grin spreading across his face. "Hey, little bro! I was in the neighborhood and thought I'd—" His eyes went comically wide as they landed on you clutching the blanket to your chest. "Oh... Oh!"

Tsukishima pinched the bridge of his nose, cheeks flushing scarlet. "Aki..."

"You... and her?" Akiteru sputtered, smile dropping as the realization sank in. He swiveled his gaze between the two of you, brows climbing higher with each passing second.

An awkward silence stretched as you shrank further into the couch cushions. Akiteru's expression morphed from shock into a teasing smirk.

"Well, well, well. I can't say I didn’t see this coming!" He let out a low whistle. "Though I can't blame you for your excellent taste, Kei."

"Don't start," Tsukishima warned, ears burning. He snatched the pastry box from Akiteru's hands and shoved it against his chest. "Now get out before I slam the door in your face."

Akiteru chuckled, holding up his free hand in surrender. "All right, all right! I'm going!" He leveled a wink your direction. "We'll have to grab drinks sometime and you can give me all the details."

"Out!"

The door slammed on Akiteru's retreating laughter. Tsukishima's shoulders slumped as he turned back to you, expression tinged with mortification.

You bit your lip to stifle a grin. "Well... that was suitably awkward."

He groaned, falling onto the couch and burying his face in your neck. "I'm never going to hear the end of this."

Chuckling softly, you carded your fingers through his sleep-mussed curls. "Look on the bright side—at least he took it better than expected?"

Tsukishima huffed but made no move to pull away from your comforting embrace. After a long moment, he tilted his head back to meet your gaze, eyes softening.

"I guess that's one way to break the news," he murmured wryly.

You laughed, leaning down to brush a soft kiss to his furrowed brow. "Don't worry, we've got all the time in the world to figure the rest out together."

A faint smile finally curved his lips as he reached up to cup your cheek, expression filled with unguarded affection. "Yeah... together sounds perfect."

#haikyuu smut #haikyuu x reader #haikyuu x reader smut #tsukishima kei #tsukishima x reader #haikyuu tsukishima #hq tsukishima #tsukishima smut #tsukishima x reader smut #tsukishima kei x reader #tsukishima kei smut #tsukishima kei x reader smut

288 notes · View notes