3 am || KiriBaku ||

3:37

3:37

There's another stretch of silence.

  By now he's sat at the edge of his bed, sheets askew and a mess and the only distance between the two is a stifling hesitance.

His hand could reach out and he could brush his thumb against the bark-like knobs of his knuckles but something binds his hands to stay on his own thigh.

There's no way to tell how long they sit beside each other in the dimness. The shadows of the room are lifted slightly, details of his ukiyo-e paintings become sharper whether it's due to a creeping dawn or a general clearness in Kirishima's sight. Part of him doesn't want to say anything, there seems to be more consolence in the rhythmless quiet than he thinks his words could construct.

Even so, if there were some uncompromising forcefield repelling them apart for the rest of their lives, it wouldn't matter, not anymore. Kirishima's fingers have memorised the stroke of the boy's threadbare hands. The roughness in the dips that connected each crook.

One thing he has learned is that everything about Katsuki is rough: his grip, the overworked callouses of his hands; it rattles like a snare drum when he speaks and ruts the drag of his limp. Rough are the edges of his face, the cut of his jaw.

The scarring on his arms like spider webs. Kirishima stroked them enough that he can run empty hands over them, tracing the patterns in the memories he dreams. Even the permanent crease between the set of his eyes. Back when they wove in and out of each other's rooms during restless, skittish nights, they'd lay on the bed they sat on now.

Back when Kirishima was too full of skirmish giddiness for much hope of sleep, electric static at his fingertips as he'd watch Bakugo with his cheek on his arm. For hours he'd follow the rise and fall of the boy next to him. Aches from mulish grins frozen on his cheeks, far too bemused by the tranquility of his usually raucous friend. He'd rub a thumb gently over the lines of the sleeping boy's brows, trying to see if they would smooth out.

These attempts became futile, overcome with a fondness of tracing these lines. Each crease was a line of a story that only Kirishima could read, and instead resorted to running his hand through the spiked tousles of light hair instead. There's a warmth he misses so dearly that came from knowing that Bakugo could feel every inch of his brush against his skin and the stillness it instilled like the dormant faces of water. No spite nor ambition, no blood plastered black to his face with a twisted glare.

Knowing that this state has become foreign to the boy that once donned it so tenderly fills empty pockets of air with melancholy.

Kirishima can recall the trailing weeks after it'd all stopped . No one noticed much at first, they were both too busy with apprenticeship and schoolwork to have been seen together had all still been normal. Kirishima could still bear stretched smiles around the familiar faces in school, biting frangible vacuums back to the ceiling of his mouth.

It was during the nights were Kirishima would curl himself over the made covers, staring at his wall, counting the fissures in the worn out plaster of his window frame, staring at them, losing count and then restarting until his head numbers out into a brain-dead haze he may as well called sleep.

It feels like yesterday, Monday on a Febuary 04:15 pm when Katsuki ploughed and tore some arterial cavity out of Kirishima. Squeezing it, tight, with crimson ribbons entwining his fingers and beading down his wrists— a faint pulse spluttering its final breaths. That's what it had felt like then. Kirishima would have been grateful had he rather been shot dead.

By 4:16 Katsuki had left the empty classroom before the other had regained enough sentiment to realise that would be the last time they would talk of anything for nearly a year.

Nearly a year where he'd never quite feel like he was doing much other than drag himself from room to room to training, to bed; no place feeling close to a destination.

Then it felt like the scope of his world had been pummelled, he'd been sure he'd never feel a stronger numbness.

Now he can only split a grave smile--the ones worn from knowing --remembering that ache that now mimics the thrashing of a small child's tantrum.