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She did not say to the sun, “Good night!”
Though she saw him there like a ball of light;
For she knew he had God’s time to keep
All over the world and never could sleep.
The tall pink foxglove bowed his head;
The violets courtesied, and went to bed;
And good little Lucy tied up her hair,
And said, on her knees, her favorite prayer.
- Richard Monckton Milnes, "Good Morning and Good Night"
Five minutes ago, Shouta had come to the conclusion that there were, in fact, eighty-seven different animals hidden amongst the blotches and drips of paint on his ceiling. That was two more than he had clocked the last time - jury was still out on whether or not the new additions were cheetahs or leopards, exactly, but Shouta reasoned that spotting something new overruled even the haziest of taxonomical guesstimations, and added them to the list regardless.
Which is to say, five minutes ago Shouta lost the last vestiges of the hope that he could bore himself to sleep.
The room was too bright, the city of Musutafu peeking through the window that the cats had unceremoniously pulled the black out curtains off of a few hours earlier. And normally that wouldn’t have been much of a problem for Shouta - he prided himself on his ability to fall asleep come hell or high water.
He closed his eyes, and took a breath slowly in through his nose. He visualized himself as a balloon, slowly filling up his chest, then his torso, then his arms and his legs, all the way to the tips of his fingers and toes...
A slight shuffle and sleep-addled moan filled the air, and Shouta's balloon popped as his husband rolled over in bed, drooped his arm over Shouta’s body, and pinned him to the mattress. On top of that, Hizashi just radiated body heat, as if it was a personal goal to out-do Endeavor’s hair. Already, Shouta felt the sweat begin to accrue on the back of his legs while his husband innocently nuzzled closer.
Sometimes the powers that be really wanted him to suffer.
In an ideal world, Shouta would appreciate the warm cuddles. Hell, at an ideal time he would be far more amenable to it. He had even tried earlier to settle with the steady rising and falling of Hizashi’s chest as he held the man close in his arms, but the brightness and the warmth and the pressure made it impossible to properly relax. He could feel his tension starting to build.
(There’s a brightness. There’s a warmth. There’s a pressure.)
He turned his head to the right and looked over at Hizashi, who had pulled out his sleep mask earlier when they had mutually decided that rehanging the curtain was just too much for them tonight after the week they’d had. It was his custom-made Eraserhead sleep mask - and Shouta softly snorted at the memory of turning over in bed a year ago and coming face to face with a two-dimensional cotton facsimile of his goggles, perched oh-so-innocently on his cheeky husband.
Hizashi was someone who needed to maintain a ritual before he fell asleep. This had been true for as long as Shouta had known the man, and was as good evidence as any that opposites truly did attract. Shouta, for instance, regularly fell asleep in crawl spaces and vents.
Briefly, Shouta wondered if he could go crawl into a vent, before dismissing it from his mind - they didn’t have any industrial vents in the unit. Hizashi had asked for that specifically, knowing the likelihood of finding Shouta curled up in one.
No, for Hizashi to properly sleep, there had to be yoga, a shower, a cup of tea, journalling or reading - to say nothing about the extracurriculars, Shouta thought wolfishly, which could happen at any given point in the routine. The bedroom itself also needed to be prepped - completely dark and lightly chilled, with no clutter.
Well.
“The room is going to be pitch-black, Shou, I’m not going to be stressing about your clothes on the floor, ya dig...?”
“Who said anything about my clothes being the ones on the floor, Mr. Different-Leather-Jacket-for-Every-Day-of-the-Week?”
One way or another, there wasn’t any clutter.
And luckily, Shouta mused as he stared across the pillows, his husband was virtually unwakeable once he was out. There was a methodical clockwork to it all. Awake, or asleep, there was no in-between for Hizashi. Another far cry from Shouta.
There had been moments during high school, before Shouta even realized that Hizashi was his friend, where the latter had played look out for him while he caught a few more winks during class. Standard schoolyard flirting, the blonde was fond of joking. But there had been one morning where the usually chipper man had come to class with bags under his eyes to rival Shouta’s, his hair lying flat and defeated across his head, and uniform not much better off.
Shouta had watched Hizashi that morning wave off the echoing notes of concern and questions that his classmates had, citing some sort of difficulty with his little sisters the night before with a strained laugh. And watched as Hizashi swayed before dropping into his desk, a quiet hiss of pained air the only indication that whatever had happened the previous night wasn’t just a matter of bothersome siblings. And watched as Hizashi sat in class, nodding and shaking himself slightly over and over again as his body drowsily tore into itself.
Finally Shouta had raised his hand and said he wasn’t feeling well, and could someone help him get to the nurse’s office, and well, it’d be most convenient to have Hizashi take him, wouldn’t it, since he was right there?
Logical ruses were something one had to learn how to do well, but they didn’t need to be subtle to work effectively.
Hizashi looked so much more innocent when he was asleep, something that was true back then in the nurse's office and true now, even with the mask covering a third of his face. His pop-punk persona fell apart when he was passed out. Shouta supposed that was true for most people, that an unconscious person couldn’t plaster a personality on their face - except for him, of course. He’d once been told even asleep he looked intimidating.
One of the best days of class he’d ever had, to be frank.
He tried to remember which of his previous students had said that, but there was a voice in his head that whispered back the things that Hizashi told him later, much later, after awkward conversations and botched social interactions were slowly carved and sanded into a platform the two of them planned to be standing on together for the rest of their lives - the reasons for the flat hair and the baggy eyes and the broken need to rest that long-ago morning and the promises made to never let sleeplessness affect that sunshine smile again…
Shouta pushed the voice away.
The man used his free hand to scratch at his stubble thoughtfully, running a few mental calculations in his head, before he carefully but firmly pulled away from Hizashi’s koala-esque grip and extradited himself from the bed. Once up on his feet, he rolled and stretched first his arms, then his neck, and finally his back, finding every possible click and crack of his joints slipping back into place. For a brief moment, he thought that was all he needed, and maybe he could find sleep.
(There’s a pressure.)
He padded out the door.
The apartment was just as quiet as it was from within his own bedroom, but Shouta felt a different sort of piece of him settle into place as he moved into the hallway. When they had moved into the space, they had specifically chosen it due to it being completely sound-proofed. This was as much for their benefit as it was the neighbors - Hizashi was a bit tough to miss when he got excited, after all. For Shouta, the sound-proofing had taken some getting used to. He spent most of his professional career actively paying attention to the minutest of sounds while slinking around in back alleys and dark corners. A home completely devoid of extraneous, exterior sounds was like a conversation with half of the syllables missing.
He paused at the first door, closest to his and Hizashi’s room. No door was every truly closed in their home, by executive order of the cats, so he gently pushed the door open further and peeked in.
The length of the room - the carefully constructed paintings pinned above the small desk, the large pile of stuffed animals, the shelves of well-loved books - all of it was cast in the warm glow of a snoozing, white ceramic rabbit, stretched lazily across a crescent moon on the low wall. The night light was a gift from Nemuri, who had dropped it off on Shouta’s desk the day after he first visited Eri in the hospital. The look on her face, as if she just knew, had been entirely infuriating at the time.
And there, amongst the silvery white hair sprawled across the pillow, was his daughter. Her upper right side hung loosely over the side of the bed, a stuffed unicorn - Moezashi, a part of his mind supplied helpfully, as if he didn’t know, as if he didn’t have each of the names of Eri’s stuffed critters memorized because the look on her face when he knew them like she did wasn’t the most addictive of - Moezashi had fallen to the floor, along with half of the bedspread.
None of his kids were particularly heavy sleepers. He supposed it would be illogical to assume anything else given what each of them had gone through individually, but even as the soft fall of his footsteps roused her from slumber, Eri only gave him a sweet, half-asleep grin, which he was powerless to do anything but return. He settled her and Moezashi together back into the bed, before she snuggled into the soft fur of the stuffed animal and closed her eyes with a soft sigh. There was a time where she would stare at him wide-eyed, amenable to his help but far too cautious to close her eyes until long after he had left the room.
A few days ago, he had awoken to find Eri climbing into bed with him during one of his naps. There was a wobbly smile on her face that reminded him too much of her favorite hero. He didn’t say anything, just opened his arms and let her nuzzle into his chest. After a few moments of rubbing her back and feeling the tension slowly bleed out, she looked up into his eyes.
“Are we going to be his heroes now?” She had said it so carefully, with maybe a little too much wisdom for her age, like there was equal parts confidence and anguish to the mere concept of saving someone.
Shouta didn’t usually hear that from people who weren’t seasoned pros.
(There’s a pressure.)
As he left Eri’s room, something made him pause. Despite training his ears, it was his eyes that caught the disturbance first - a slight flash of light coming from the crack in the next door, which had been pushed just a touch more closed as if to avoid any errant illumination from spilling out into the hall.
Shouta raised a brow and moved to the door, telegraphing his steps only slightly more than necessary. As he pushed the door open, his eyes trailed across the dark walls and messy topography of a floor covered with clothes and books - things that Shouta would normally have said something about if not for the entirety of the past week being a very good excuse, all things considered - before he settled on the two boys sitting knee to knee on the cot in the center of it all, the poorly-concealed glow of a phone’s flashlight between them casting a small halo of light around one their hands. The nearby bed was tragically abandoned. Shouta leaned into the door frame, his arms crossed.
“Having a good time?” he asked casually.
Hitoshi and Izuku blinked at him, twin owlish expressions on their face for a split second before Izuku’s turned sheepish, his scarred hands twisting around the duvet cover like he was wringing out a dish towel. Hitoshi managed to keep eye contact with Shouta and answered, all too seriously, “Oodles.”
Izuku snorted at that, likely involuntarily, because his eyes grew from the size of saucers to serving trays. He looked like he was about to vomit out an apology, but Shouta cut him off - and cut off the same little voice that realized Izuku was already so much like Hitoshi in that way, that Hitoshi’s snark was only possible after years of practice, years of wondering when this little kid would feel confident enough to know that he wasn’t going anywhere, wasn’t going to be hurt for making eye contact, wasn’t going to be beaten down and thrown out, he was safe, and home and -
Ignore the voice. “What are you doing up?”
Hitoshi raised his hands as if demonstrating. “I was teaching Izuku sign.”
The answer was simple, and it just about squeezed Shouta’s heart flat. He nodded minutely, and Hitoshi returned the gesture. Good. But someone had to be the parent.
“Go to bed, you two. And by that I mean,” he added, aiming his words at Hitoshi who looked like he was about to object that they already were in bed, “The bed you will be sleeping in.”
Hitoshi’s mouth snapped shut, twisting into a scowl only for a second before his face smoothed over into his usual bored expression. “Yeah, yeah.”
(There’s a pressure.)
Sleep had never come easily to his eldest. The morning after the first night Hitoshi had spent with them, Shouta hadn’t been surprised to see the ten-year hadn’t slept the night before, but he was taken aback by how adamant the kid was about keeping his head up every consecutive morning, despite the exhaustion that rolled off of his little body like a fog.
As a pro hero who worked in the world of stealth and snatched cat-naps, Shouta was begrudgingly impressed. As a new parent, on the other hand...Well, they had just finalized Hitoshi’s new social worker - the old one, apparently, had been less discerning about the ethical consequences of using muzzles on children, and it would have been just their luck to save Hitoshi only to lose him to someone who actually knew how to do their job and put the child’s health above all else.
A month into having Hitoshi in their home, Shouta had come home from a late patrol to find his family laid out across the couch - the two humans on either side with the furry ones laying across their entangled legs. Hitoshi’s head had whipped around at the door, but after seeing who it was the kid had smiled and waved before turning back to Hizashi, who winked at Shouta before picking up his hands again. As Shouta had peeled off his boots, he watched as Hizashi walked the young boy through basic sign. They were still walking through basic sentences when Shouta had returned and settled into the other couch with a fresh change of clothes, only just getting to more complex phrases by the time that Shouta had drifted off.
The poor kid was traumatized. Sleep never came easily to minds that had seen too much. But Shouta had watched the fatigue in Hitoshi fade just a little that night, the young boy’s mind gripping something outside of itself, a little tighter than the hold on the bad memories.
So as Hitoshi flopped into his actual bed, and Izuku moved to turn off the flashlight, Shouta cleared his throat. “You can keep the light on. I expect to be able to hold a basic conversation with you tomorrow morning.”
Hitoshi grinned at that, and nodded at Izuku. “Are you kidding Dad? He’ll be analysing you in sign by tomorrow morning.”
Shouta smirked, and after a moment of Izuku staring back and forth between the two of them, he also smiled, if a little more cautiously. As if he wasn’t sure whether he was the butt of the joke or not. As if he was…
Quiet. The Problem Child was speaking.
“Thank you, Aizawa-sensei,” Izuku’s voice piped up. The smaller teen said it softly. Or maybe Shouta had tuned out while taking down the voices in his head. It was anyone’s guess
“Shouta, kid. Shouta in the house is fine, or even Aizawa. No need for sensei here.”
“Yes, right. I’m sorry.” Shouta had no doubt that the honorific would crop up again tomorrow - and long after that, the Voice chimed again, inviting Shouta to think about how the long road they were now on had absolutely no end in sight. Just painful turns.
And there had already been so many of those, hadn’t there? An interruption during class from an apologetic third year, summoning both him and his student to Nedzu’s office, shouldn’t fill a man who faced down the worst of society at night - and the brilliant idiocy of teenagers during the day - with fear. But there was a moment, right in the midst of it, that Shouta could pinpoint with a painful accuracy. It was instinct, more than anything, that told him something had already happened that he couldn’t do a thing to change. And the Problem Child, walking down the hall with him, looked like he had also come to the same realisation.
The kid didn’t collapse in the hall, or Nedzu’s office, or even at the hospital while stuck in that infernal waiting room which surely must regularly need to replace its floors after the amount of pacing that must happen there. Not that the kid paced. He sat, stalwart, through it all, a fixed expression on his face despite eyes brimming with too much of everything.
An accident.
Of all things, an accident.
An accident shouldn’t send a life into limbo and a kid teetering on the line of grief and hope. It was a sick joke with no punchline.
Shouta had never met Midoriya Inko prior to the moment that he and the kid walked into her room, though they had exchanged obligatory phone calls to the tune of “Your Problem-Child son blew up a building today, here’s what we intend to do to curb that behavior.” There was irony in there somewhere. Midoriya-san had been laid out in a hospital bed that was too big for her small frame, dressed to the nines in bandages and tubes, and Shouta had called her about her son’s self-destructive behavior.
She looked so much like her son. Shouta had to blink to make sure the positions weren’t reversed. It wouldn't’ have been better if it had.
After a moment to be sure that Izuku would be okay on his own, Shouta slipped out to talk to the doctors. To talk to Nedzu. To talk to Yagi, who for some reason - some reason, the Voice quipped scornfully - had come to the hospital to comfort the problem child. Truthfully he wasn’t upset by that. Grateful, in fact. He would have had to be be blind and on the other side of the world to not see that Izuku and Yagi had slotted each other into their lives so thoroughly that the almost-retired pro hero would be just the person to keep the kid steady while his entire world collapsed around him.
The first few days, Izuku was excused from classes, while Yagi stayed with him at the hospital.
Shouta walked into the hospital on the third day with a sour taste in his mouth.
He found Izuku curled up in All Might’s lap on a couch in an otherwise abandoned lobby on the third floor. The blonde man, who was stroking the kid’s hair gently, looked up to greet Shouta as he sat down across from him. They sat in silence for a few moments, just watching the unconscious boy.
“Young Midoriya hasn’t slept,” Yagi said softly. He sighed, as if trying to adjust a weight in his chest. “He’s just been staring at his mother, waiting. He finally just passed out an hour ago.”
Shouta inspected the constellations of the sleeping boy’s freckles, tracing the faint lines of exhaustion that persisted even as Izuku slept. There was a soft mumble of a word from his mouth at that point, and both heroes stilled, straining their ears for it again. The word never came. Izuku settled, twitching slightly in a nameless dream.
“You haven’t been able to contact his father, have you?”
“No.” Shouta glared at the ceiling, as if that was where the missing Midoriya was hiding. “And without further family members he officially became a ward of Yuuei. Or at least he did once Nedzu was done.”
Yagi gave a small, empty laugh at that. “And their apartment?”
“Taken care of. Legally speaking they’re paid until the end of the month, but Nedzu wisely reminded the landlord of the sort of publicity that could come with evicting the comatose single mother of one of the most promising hero students at Yuuei. And he delivered that reminder personally.” Now it was Shouta’s turn to huff out a laugh. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the guy gave them a refund of the last two year’s expenses.”
“So are we sending him back to the apartment...?” Yagi’s voice trailed off at the end.
Alone. That was the word that Yagi was avoiding. Shouta wanted to spit at the thought.
“No. He can go back if he wants, of course, but when he’s not at the dorms he’ll either be put under the immediate care of one of the faculty at their home or his.” At that, Shouta locked eyes with Yagi, and waited. It had been the week before a break for the students, a break that prior to this point had meant a release. Now it felt like a deadline. There was no room to wait, short of Izuku’s preferences. A decision had to be made. And it had to be made by people other than Shouta for it to stick.
For all that Shouta respected Yagi as a hero, a co-worker, and even as a friend, on this one point he was afraid he couldn’t in good conscience allow Yagi to not think this through.
Yagi stared back, his sunken eyes reaching a level of electricity that even Shouta hadn’t seen before on the man. The man looked down at the teen - the child - in his lap. Shouta was pleased to see that the hero’s tendency to rush into things didn’t seem to cross his expression. Instead, there was a slow shift of expressions as the silence ticked by. There was fondness. There was protectiveness. And there was grief.
Shouta was fine. He steepled his fingers and waited. He wasn’t on the edge of his seat, and a creeping coil of anxiety wasn’t pooling at the base of his stomach.
Yagi Toshinori was many things, after all.
“I wouldn’t be able to, ah,” Yagi started and stopped, and Shouta’s fingers tensed. “I would only hurt him the same way, I fear.” He vaguely waved his hands at himself before giving up on the expression and carding his hands through the back of his hair, voice thick. “I already will with the way things are going. I don’t want to make that worse.”
Shouta felt the coil in his stomach loosen, by a fraction. Good. There was still a lot to discuss. But for now - “You won’t abandon him when that happens.”
“Of course not.” Despite keeping his voice low, Yagi’s tone was as resolute and defiant as it was when he was in his heroic form. But only a minute after that, his righteous indignation had collapsed in itself, and he looked tired. Much more tired than after Kamino. “But he needs someone who...can take care of him. Not the other way around. And I can’t promise that, if it goes on...”
Shouta had grunted, throwing both Yagi and himself a bone, as Izuku stirred again, and then he burst awake with a gasp, already brushing off concerns for him to ask about his mother, and then there was a whirlwind of conversation that later, Shouta wouldn't care to remember until the Voice would bring it up. After all, they were still deep in the woods. There was still a million other little things to consider. But there was one victory here, a fight that never came, so that was something worth relishing in.
Neither man wished to poke at the paper-thin excuse in their minds that all the plans, all the preparation, was of course just until Midoriya Inko woke up. They would just watch her son for her. For as long as it took.
(There’s a pressure.)
Shouta blinked, and stared back at Izuku, who was in his home, looking up at him from the cot with a thankful expression on his face. He wasn’t alone in an apartment. He was sharing a room with Hitoshi. They were setting up a bedroom in the spare room but so long as the teens were sharing there was still an excuse in everyone’s minds, still the vaguest of hope in everyone’s minds, that there was something temporary to the tragedy.
God, had it only been a week? It felt so much longer.
He could hear himself saying, “No problem kid. Good night, you two,” before he slipped away down the hall.
He could feel the floor on his bare feet. There was a tail that just turned the corner. The hum of the refrigerator was coming from just the other room. And there was a small giddy buzz of satisfaction, deep in some part of his brain that said his kids were all safe, all safe in bed, and he could go back to bed and fall asleep but he couldn’t fall asleep now, now could he, perhaps a drink of water a drink of water would be so helpful at this point, maybe that would be the thing that would him to sleep and it would quiet the voice that just wouldn’t shut up as his thoughts began to build and build and build -
The hallway always looked so long and dark at this time of night.
Aizawa slumped against the wall to the floor at the far end, away from the bedrooms, pressing the palms of his hands into his eyes. He focused on that pressure. He tried to, at least. But he could already feel it, the deep well of exhaustion and stress at the front of his chest, always so close and so ready to be mishandled. One wrong thought, one errant depressive consideration, and he’d be spiraling. Fuck. He already was.
He already was.
I wonder if this is what heartache feels like for everyone?
When Shouta was eight, he broke his arm. He fell out of a jungle gym, trying to prove he could get to the top despite the little shitbird eleven year old (his father’s words, not his, though adult Shouta would hardly disagree) telling him he couldn’t. The break was nothing special - it was clean, and patched up quickly with the help of an ER nurse who Shouta couldn’t for the life of him picture except that they smelt vaguely of raisins.
But that night was the first night Shouta had been unable to fall asleep. He had tossed and turned all night, unable to find any relief. His arm wasn’t even sore or anything, and he didn’t want to run to his parents bedroom about it like a baby. But his mind wouldn’t stop replaying the events of the day, and each time that they looped the memories would just get louder. After trying to count sheep, ducks, cows, and even cats, he had given up and padded into their kitchen to get something to drink.
He had been surprised when he realized his mom was already sitting at the kitchen table, nursing a teacup. The room was lit only by the light of the night coming through the open window adjacent to the table.
She must have heard him make some sound, because she turned to him, her dark eyes glowing slightly in the dark. “Shouta.”
Shouta had inherited many things from each of his parents, and he loved them all dearly, but there had never been any mistaking that he wasn’t his mother’s son first and foremost. Aizawa Amatsu not only had passed along her son’s dark features, but entire shadows clung to her like it was clothing she herself had carefully considered in the mirror each and every morning. Her smokey voice was rarely raised or lowered, and yet she never seemed to lose the attention of a room when she wanted it. She had the potential to be incredibly intimidating even at her most pleased.
(There had been a time when he wondered how such a person could ever have ended up with both his dad and his father, people who were not the personification of night or even of being just quiet, but then he had gone and married Hizashi and proved he was even more his mother’s son than anyone had thought before.)
That night, his mother stayed up with him, her arms wrapped around him as they watched the darkness pass across the hours, only moving to refill cups of tea. For the most part they stayed silent, content to listen to the passing cars, the hum of the appliances, and the snoring coming from down the hall. But there was at one point when he felt his mother startle suddenly. He had scrambled out of her lap, afraid he had accidentally pinched her. She let him go, but when he turned to face her she hadn’t looked distressed.
“Are you okay, Mom?”
“Yes, child. I just realized it’s already three o’clock.”
Shouta’s brow had furrowed at that. While his mother was able to see in the dark perfectly, her back was to the stove’s digital read-out. He turned around towards the window, peering into the gloom, trying to find the clock she must have been reading.
A set of hands pulled him back into her lap, before she raised a finger up into the sky, to where he could just make out the Northern star. “Nature’s timepiece, child.” And then she had guided his own hand, marking the steps of drawing an imaginary line between the star and the Big Dipper. He sat enraptured as she murmured in his ear about midnight, the distance between stars, and how one could use that information to know the time even without a clock. How, in less than a century, Polaris would no longer be the true Northern star, and people would instead have to look towards the darkness between an old king and a young bear in order to navigate. And how beautiful, how fascinating that future will be, people living with proof emblazoned across the sky that they couldn’t reliably choose between two absolutes, but must at some point trust an uncertain emptiness to guide their understanding of both time and space.
(There’s a pressure.)
He looked up to see Din, their oldest cat, head butting into him, demanding affection. Shouta didn’t even realize he had started petting her until a few minutes later, after he had already buried his face into her fur to sob. Din wriggled at the sudden shift, and Shouta had just enough state of mind to let her go. He instead twisted onto the ground, his fists between his mouth and the floor, and let himself collapse.
His body shook. There were no tears, his dry eye saw to that, but he let his anger and hopelessness burn through his body until he began to grieve that he couldn’t even cry to let that heat out.
In fact, all old pains flowed seamlessly with new ones, unwilling to respect the fact that Shouta had already cried for them enough, until it was Hizashi who was experimented on and his mom who was muzzled and Izuku who was in the hospital bed. Milestones and pebbles of growth and pain picked apart and put back together again and again as Shouta’s mind crashed against itself.
He stayed on the ground that way for what could have been hours. Or minutes.
Slowly, as the tension left his body, and Shouta began to breathe through his clogged throat, he could feel himself return. First his lungs. Then his torso. Then his arms and legs…
Breathe.
He ran his hands over his face, before slowly pulling himself up. Din was seated nearby, staring at him expectantly, her eyes glowing ever so slightly in the dimness. He sighed, and gave her some scritches under the chin. She graciously accepted, curling closer into his arms before trailing back down the hall towards his bedroom.
Well. He could take a hint.
Shouta tried his best to mark the passage of time not with minutes, days, or even stars - but with moments. Happy moments. Moments that could break the swells of grief that threatened to spill out over him.
He climbed into bed, the soft chirp of Din as he reclaimed his side of the bed the only hurdle. He slithered up to spoon Hizashi, who had turned over completely in his sleep. His tense muscles uncoiled as he felt his husband's breathe rise as fall against him.
He would never remember an August like he could remember the sound of his daughter sighing sleepily in his arms. A Tuesday would fall to the wayside to recall the sight of his sons working themselves up into an excited fervor of hushed whispers and barely-concealed anticipation. And the hour was strictly immaterial - he could measure the heat of his husband’s body instead.
Shouta breathed into Hizashi’s neck, and if the man spilled either a few more tears or a barely-born laugh into the pillow, it was nobody’s business but his own and the menagerie of animals on the ceiling. Just before his eyes slid closed, he thought he spotted a hitherto undocumented animal above him, right by the ceiling fan.
He'd investigate it tomorrow.
(There was still a pressure on his body. There was a persistent whine in the air. There was a thought that just wouldn’t stop whirring around his head. There was always something that just wouldn’t…)
Hush.
Shouta slept.