We Were Phoenixes || Kuroo Tetsurou

[1]

The beating of his heart was echoing off the sides of the hallway and the lack of furniture and decorations in the small house were, for sure, amplifying the rhythmic thumping. Kuroo Tetsurou was certain of it. That was clearly the reason the only thing he could hear right now was the ocean, despite any naturally running water being more than an hour's drive away.

And the reason why he felt like he couldn't swallow... well, he couldn't quite put his finger on that one, but it certainly wasn't because his emotions were trying to claw their way out of his heart and up his throat. No — he'd had that trained out of him years ago.

If he was being honest though, he had also been trained to know when he was second guessing himself or when his brain was trying to make excuses for something it couldn't, or didn't want to, understand. Right now, he didn't want to admit that the moisture in his palms wasn't due to the weather (he couldn't very well blame it on the humidity when it was snowing outside) and he hadn't yawned recently enough to to blame that for the blurring of his vision.

To be perfectly frank, he was an emotional wreck walking down that narrow hallway — the perfect embodiment of everything he was supposed to not be as one of the top intelligence agents in Japan — but there was hardly anything he could do about it. He was that nervous and upset.

His hand shook as he went to turn the plastic door knob that was etched to look like some elegant crystal back in the '70s but now dated the house more than any yellow paint or green appliance could. The most important lost treasure in the world was waiting for him behind that door and his pounding heart and quivering hands seemed to acknowledge that far better than his rational, trained mind could. His tactical side was telling him to stop — that he wasn't ready to see what was on the other side of that hollow wood door — but that god-forsaken organ in his chest was working overtime to override logic by overloading his brain with oxygen.

When the heart wants to win, not even government-sanctioned military training can keep it at bay. Some might call that foolish sentimentality, but Kuroo knew better than anyone that sometimes, you just have to trust your gut.

The door squeaked as it opened (another sign of age and neglect). The noise should have set him off. An absence of sound was literally part of the job description, but the lost treasure was waiting for him and, maybe, he could spare the rules this once when they'd already taken so much away.

- - -

Thinking back, Kuroo had never felt particularly salty about this whole thing. Sure, when the government showed up at his front door and his grandmother started crying, he had a brief, cold trickle of fear, but the whole gig sounded way too fucking cool for him to ever consider feeling unlucky.

When he was packing up his things into that single, hard, grey suitcase, his dad had gone out of his way to sit on his bed the entire time and talk about how much he and Kuroo's grandparents would miss him, how the house would be quieter without him running around and how they always, always knew that their boy was something special. It was an honor, his dad had said. Only 30 thirteen year-olds are chosen each year. You must be something amazing to have caught their eye.

It never occurred to his barely-teenager mind that there was an overwhelming air of loss as he walked out the door of his childhood house, not set to return until he was a full-fledged spy or in a wooden box. He was way too excited — thinking about how he'd be the second coming of Hattori Hanzo — to notice the tears in the corners of his father's (a man who had already lost his wife and was now having his only child taken away) eyes.

From the moment he sat down in that nondescript back sedan and waved his hand out of the window at his family and his best friend, standing there with an almost indistinguishable frown on his lips, he never looked back and never once questioned if moving forward was best for him.