3 am || KiriBaku ||

3:40

3:40

is when without thought, Kirishima raises a tentative hand, a magnetic need pulling it to rest against the back of Katsuki, just over the jagged shoulder blade.

It's light, his palm only brushes the bumpy surface of his skin. He tenses underneath the half-borne touch. The muscles like armour along his arm and sternum seem to hold their breath in a stifled agony.

Kirishima almost immediately flinches away in a wired reflex, scared that there is some poison in his hands he's not aware of. But he fights against his judgement, pleading himself to not cower, not from his friend. Kirishima often thought if Katsuki was North everything else became South. It's an unwritten rule.

But it's not a time for rules. He longs after the days they clung among the grass in early dawn. Everyone thought they were on a morning run, and maybe they were running from something, but it wasn't from each other and that was what mattered. They were liars, lying and feeling the coarse earth against their backs and the coarse surfaces of each other. He wants to break the rules again.

His hand presses itself, strong, his palm flexes so it's entire perimeter smoothes out onto the entire curve of his scapula. White bleeds into the set of his skin as Kirishima pushes each finger deeper against him.

Kirishima realsies that he's not touching but gripping him now, squeezing all sensation back into him as if this were one last, desperate feel of colour in the black and white deadness that's been axyphicsiating. He wants to ravish the warmth of a body he'd once been so familiar with before they're sent out into another mission where the spray of blood will be the only source of heat from the cold bodies je couldn't save.

It's like the release of pent up gas in a grenade. The sudden softness in the muscles, the shaky settle of his shoulders with an exhale so haggard it almost rattles him entirely. Kirishima can practically feel every tendon in Katsuki's body breath, widening as if bearing the cocoon of a new life in spring. Even if he's only touching a fragment of him, Kirishima feels as though he's holding him entirely.

Neither say anything, but neither needs to. This is their language; one that had nearly settled under dust. Kirishima can feel the relief swelling inside him. A frail gratitude, one that he will hold and nurture until it's a charging current again. Shifting closer, his knee bumps against the other boy's knee. It's stopped trembling.

Everything is so still, only the echoes of their heartbeats prys the silence. This time it's not in fear. They keep catching their breaths, fortuitously, but it's not anticipation. Kirishima inclines his face until his mouth rests against the crook of Bakugo's neck and it feels like it fits there habitually again. Feeling him there, next to him, under him, everywhere-- he thinks he can make it to the finish line. If he can cross it with Katsuki then nothing else matters.