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mcdonaldsnumberone · 1 month

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STILL ALIVE!

tobio kageyama learns to fall in love with the small things. although in his eyes, no thing is truly small as long as you're involved in it. a ruined kitchen for a strawberry tart is a small price to pay to admire your everyday.

gender neutral reader

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Tobio found out not too long after you moved in with him that he liked watching you while you worked your magic in the kitchen.

He was always a stickler for what he ate. Ever since he was young, the adults around him hammered the importance of food and its nutritious properties into his volleyball-filled head, and like the good boy he was, Tobio took everything they said with a great deal of respect and dedicated himself into his strict upkeep so that he could do his best on the court. Now as an adult, he adhered to a strict diet of nutritious vegetables and plenty of protein. But given that his mind was hyperfixated on volleyball and he was never one to get super creative in the kitchen, there was never much variety to his diet outside of his regular rotation of healthy meals tailor-made for a professional athlete’s needs.

Frankly speaking, he never thought he’d need too much variety. Tobio was a man of schedule, of regularity, of volleyball and volleyball only. Everything he did, from maintaining his nails whenever he got the chance to doing finger exercises with weights before bed, was to augment his skills as an athlete. His food was no exception. He wasn’t picky. All he needed was the proper nutrients to fuel his body, and as long as it didn’t taste horrendously awful, he was fine with it.

Once he started dating you though, he started eating other things more and more. At first it was ordering a slice of espresso-tinged tiramisu occasionally while on a date with you, and then it turned into you insisting on packing him a bento box whenever his practices and matches required for him to be out of the house all day. Next thing he knew, you’d greet him with a piping hot dinner whenever he trudged back home, and the aches in his limbs seemed to melt away as he wolfed down whatever you had whipped up while he was gone. It was never the same two meals in a row, and despite being unused to unpredictability, Tobio found himself looking forward to mealtimes specifically with you.

He learned early on in his life, thanks to his grandfather, that cooking for someone was an art just as much as it was an underappreciated act of love. And with each bite, he savored the love that you must have poured into it, just as much as he dedicated himself to perfecting his craft in order to show you how far your love took him. There were times he wished he was an eloquent man, a more romantic man, so that he could actually articulate all the fuzzy feelings overwhelming him whenever you made food for him.

But you didn’t need words to understand him.

And he loved you.

He barely stifled a smile as he sat a few feet away from the kitchen, where you were frantically scurrying around. He knew you were probably frazzled, desperately scrolling through the recipe websites that had videos and ads scattered throughout them to make it almost impossible to access the actual recipe. But the cacophony of your slightly annoyed exhales, the banging of pots and pans, and the clatter of glass plates being shifted around every now and then were like a sweet melody to Tobio.

He feigned interest in the match he was supposed to be studying, and he stole a glance across the living room to see you dump something into a big bowl before sticking your hands into the mixture. Tobio has loved you for as long as he has known you, but there was something especially calming and bewitching about seeing you do something so ordinary. He stared at you with a softness in his eyes he couldn’t quite describe, a softness that he wasn’t even aware was there half of the time, as he watched you let out little grunts to work whatever tough dough you were kneading.

The apron you insisted on wearing was already skewed, and he knew that by the end of your little cooking session, the apron would have done nothing to keep your clothes from getting covered in bits of food. Your eyes were fixed downwards in concentration, the skin in between scrunched up cutely. Your sleeves were rolled up but not quite secure as you might have hoped, and Tobio could also see that in a few minutes they would probably become undone and you’d have to call him over to ask him to roll them up properly for you since your hands were covered in sticky dough.

Tobio believed love was in the little things. Love was in the way he’d accept an earful from his dietician from sneaking in one too many desserts that you insisted on him having. Love was in the way he let himself get distracted so he could watch you make a mess out of the kitchen counter, and he prayed that you never learned how to clean the countertop off thoroughly because he loved going over and wiping off the marks of sauce and flour with a clean dishrag of his own. Love was in the way you cheekily stole a lick of the sweet dough from your fingers before washing your hands off in the sink, your sleeves rolling down your forearms and wrists and the telltale loud yelp you let out when the sink water lapped at the edges.

“Tobio!” You cried out, yanking your hands away from the sink. A few water droplets dripped down from the back of your hands and alongside the silhouette of your fingers. Your hands were always so much smaller in comparison to his wide, calloused palms, and the drops of water fell helplessly onto the floor. “Can you help me roll my sleeves on?”

He acted as if he hadn’t been staring at you for more or less the entire time, and he hurriedly paused the match. He would have to rewind it and rewatch it later, but he had a much more urgent task at hand. You grinned at him as he shuffled his way into the kitchen, and you held your arms up.

“What are you making?” The smell of something sweet had been wafting through the house a long time ago, the notes of sugar and vanilla intermingling all throughout the atmosphere. The kitchen looked as if a hurricane had passed through it: a mountain of dirty tools splayed out on the table, flour spread across a section of the countertop, and the cabinet doors thrown open and not properly closed. Had he been someone else, or any less in love with you, he might have considered all of this as an eyesore or a mountain of impossible chores, but Tobio’s heart swelled so much in his chest that he felt like he was struggling to keep his usual stoic expression.

“A tart!” You announced proudly. His fingertips brushed against the delicate skin of your wrists as he folded your sleeves over, and he made sure they wouldn’t fall down again. “Do you remember the restaurant we had dinner at last week? The one where I got a slice of strawberry tart for dessert? Oh, I couldn’t stop thinking about it… So I decided I was going to try making it myself! You’ll have some once I finish making it, right?”

That’s if you actually manage to make it. The thought bubbled to the forefront of Tobio’s mind, accompanied with a defeated but still adoring smile. It looked like he was in for another long lecture about watching his sugar consumption from his dietician, but he would gladly take an eon of scoldings than pass up on a chance to eat the treats you made.

He picked up the tart crust sitting in its pan, and he gestured towards the heated oven. “Why don’t we put this in the oven to bake first? But yeah, I would love to have a slice once you’re done.”

You beamed at him, laughing sheepishly at your airheadedness before stepping aside for him to maneuver the delicate tart crust into the oven. If he looked closely, he could see where you had filled the holes in the crust with extra dough. Bits and pieces of the edges were lumpy and not quite fully adhered to the shape of the pan. He already knew it wouldn’t look anything like the pretty store-bought crusts or the expertly crafted ones in the bakeries around town, but judging from the fingerprints etched into the dough and your giddiness, Tobio would happily pass it off as a Michelin star pastry if anyone cared for his opinion.

“You’re the best!” You gushed at him as he walked past, and he let a flash of pride light up the inside of his chest as he settled back down in the living room. You hummed some tune slightly out of pitch as he settled back down into the couch, turning the game back on. The sounds of commentary and the players quickly melted into background noise when he found his eyes sneaking back over to you, splashing water all over the surrounding areas of the sink as you rinsed the strawberries in order to chop them up.

The bright crimson of the fruit stood in contrast to your skin, and Tobio’s eyes crawled all over the shape of your pinched fingers. You carefully sliced them up to the size you wanted, the knife marks a little jagged and not super straight. But they were perfect in your eyes, so they were also perfect in Tobio’s eyes. He can imagine the sour pangs of the fruit in his own mouth when you chow down on a handful of strawberry pieces that didn’t quite make your cut. Your fingertips, the cutting board, and a small part of your apron was stained with the pink, sticky strawberry juice, but you looked so proud scooping up the bits of strawberry and setting them aside.

None of this was particularly special, but Tobio admired you from afar as if his vision had been coated over with honey. But he lived for these small moments, lived for the trivial everyday parts, like you dancing around in the kitchen with strawberry juice and dough bits stuck to you, and Tobio would be mesmerized all the same as if he was staring at you at the wedding altar. And god, does he hope a day like that might come, where he can make these small scenes a promised reality for the rest of his life, taking in the beauty from places you would never have expected and uncovering different ways for him to fall in love with you all over again.

He wished the thirty minute timer you set for the tart crust to bake could last forever. He could die a happy man, right here and now, eyes fixed on you until the end of time as you happily turned the kitchen upside-down in order to satisfy your craving for a sweet treat. He loved the way you approached life with a newfound vigor that bled into his own day-to-day, turning his bland and predictable meals into something for him to look forward to, be it a recipe you pulled from a social media website or you doing your best to recreate the dishes he enjoyed so much in his childhood. You always went the extra mile for him, the same way he did for you. Tobio didn’t need any grand gestures of love, nor was he one for anything like that, and he would rather learn how to love and be loved through these small, continual motions that came and went like the gentle pull of the waves to the silver-tinted moon.

But for now, he let the softness of the couch envelop him as he watched you from across the room, the pitter-patter of your bare feet on the kitchen tile like the sounds of wedding bells. He didn’t need to taste the unfinished strawberry tart to know that he was going to taste every bit of it like it was his last meal, swallowing the warmth back like an oath and a promise, to cherish and love you for as long as this life would let him.

Nothing could be sweeter.

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