3 am || KiriBaku ||

3:35

3:35

is the first time in one of the longest years of his life that Katsuki looks at him.

Not in the look that often brushes his subjects aside as they pass in corridors; the jarring automated language that expels one another through grit teeth during training.

Those times whenever Katsuki looks at him, he never looked, just skimmed over him like the useless tiny writing at the back of every textbook they'd make fun of.

When Katsuki looks at him these days, it goes through him, to the back of his head. It doesn't burn with morose, his gaze is usually too impalpable. Whenever Katsuki looks at him, Kirishima feels rendered to an inanimate object-- like clothes thrown into the dark corner of a room: lost and dirty. It hurt more than any smarting punch the blonde could muster.

Sometimes his nails itch to dig into the scars strung around Katsuki's forearms to see if any sting reflects off in a fraction of his face, only to despise himself for willing such a thing to anyone.

Right now Katsuki isn't looking at him; he's seeing him. Drinking him in, listlessly. The heat cast off the screwn up figure churns in him like oxygen, plaiting his bloodstream. Kirishima has been starved of it, and yet now looking at his reflection staring back at him, there's no satiation, only the lump in his throat cracking into shards that could act as some sick excuse for food.

The eyes he's longed to etch into him are bloodshot. Rubies glinting vehemently in the dark. Cheekbones sharp, the flesh and fat that would swell and dimple with devilish derision had been  gouged out in fistfuls, ridding such childish carelessness. 

He's cut to the bone from absent appetites and sunken bruises circle his eyes to make him appear skeletal. Knife sharp ridges of his every feature have been beaten to brittle hollowness, throwing shadows around his sickly face.

He bears that tired that won't leave, not ever. It's threaded and healed itself like scar tissue. Despite this there is no taint of cede that Kirishima has become regretful acquaintances with one too many times. He hasn't looked in the mirror lately but Kirishima doesn't think he's become this tethered. He feels like himself-- throttled and sore, but still himself.

Katsuki looks not even like an apparition of himself, but a completely different creature. How could he not be?

It all rushes back like the hot blood in his cheeks the first time he saw Katsuki take the towering mecha down during the entrance exam. How ethereal those moments feel as memories. The rest of them, fragments of younger days open up to fresh wounds, billowing in gushes like torn arteries, so fast that he feels like his lungs will fill up and burst.

The tournament, the raids, the kidnappings, All for One, Shigaraki; the weights dropped on his back, grinding into his scapulas; stretching his spine with crackling force; splitting his joints, thinning his veins and pulpy wounds until his skin all around hangs taut. He's been tossed around by tragedy like dead meat; borne from his savage instinct to hook his fingers to the highest pillar-- to be number one.

But the thing is, there is no number one. Todoroki had talked of it one night in dorm common rooms, legs crossed on the floor with calm lips to a cup of tea. There's never a time he's not wrongly poised. His words carried like the whistle of a soft wind, talking of an abstract sense of augustus that licked the chests of the pros who stood on podiums each year.

How you become top by plunging into battle, blind, drunk; Calenture lust often indistinct from the cries of civilians. To gamble for a better chance of standing amongst the legendary was a means to gamble your own life, bidding a higher risk with each victory.

Kirishima didn't take much of what Todoroki would say with him-- the boy was wistful but carried a cloudy bitterness that made Kirishima's chest clench ever since Endeavour, his father, became number one. Now however he unpacks those words carefully, seeing what had been the defiant fire once fervent and familiar in his friend's eyes be snatched- no ripped through the cracks of his tissue to a dead husk.

What terrifies Kirishima-- seeing the ash in his friend's eyes, tasting it in his own mouth like grains of sand--is that he knows Katsuki won't stop, not even if he does reach the top, only until he collapses into the form of a battered, bloodless corpse. It breaks Kirishima, whatever wholeness is left of his commiseration.

He misses the weightlessness that came with being first years. 16 feels so long ago, not even a part of this timeline, and yet it's barely been two years.