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“Father, no!”
“Dear, we’re hydroplaning.”
“SHUT UP I KNOW WHAT I AM DOING.”
“Dear, are you drunk?”
“WHAT? You stupid woman, no, I’m n-”
“DAD LOOK OUT-”
Crash.
———
Shouto lurches to sitting upright, chest heaving, tattoo on his left pec rippling as he does. He’s shirtless, covered in a cold sweat, wearing a pair of boxers. His eyes are wide with panic, fear, whatever else could be found in their stormy, mismatched, maelstrom-like depths. He’s terrified and he needs to be upright right the fuck now.
He launches to his feet and stands up, feet finding the cold wood of the floor of his room, hands pushing through his sweat drenched hair as if he were trying to clear the nightmares- no, the memories from his head. He can’t breathe, not really. His face is pale and gaunt and his endless pacing makes the floorboards squeak a little wherever he walks. He needs to be outside, needs to go to the bridge, but his father will find out because the stairs squeak and then everything will just be so much worse. And he can’t handle worse right now.
Blindly, he manages to pull on a pair of sweatpants before he continues pacing frantically, eyes still too wide and unfocused, breaths still too shallow and meaningless. He still can’t breathe so he finds a clear spot against the wall, plants both his hands against it, head tilted toward the floor, and he heaves for air. He reteaches himself for the seven millionth time how to breathe slowly and deeply enough that his lungs register that air is actually around him and that he is alive in the here and the now and not the back and the then.
He can’t be back then. He just can’t. It might break him.
It might break him again.
A broken sob leaps forward from his lips and hits the wall as the memories crash over his again like a sharp aftershock from a tsunami. A hot tear rolls down each cheek, one feeling number than the other. The tears feel like knives carving tracks down his skin and that’s because they are. They’re knives of the past reaching up to haunt him again like a ghost whispering in his ear.
He starts pacing again as that scene plays over and over in his head. Why won’t it go away? Why is it still here? Why, why, why, why, WHY?
“Mom-” And that is as far as he gets, just a syllable. But a single syllable is often times enough to make a word that holds meaning. And here? Here, this single syllable word means loss, means horror, means terror, means more tears rolling down Shouto’s cheeks, more sobs finding their ways out past the unsuccessful boundaries of his lips.
Shouto knows that his father will hear him and if his father doesn’t hear him then Fuyumi will and Fuyumi doesn’t bang on the door and call him weak and then leave again after yelling at him. No, Fuyumi opens the door without waiting for a response to her knocking and she usually asks Shouto what’s wrong, whether it was a nightmare, whether is was dad. Then she usually hugs him and he breaks and cries on her shoulder like a child.
Of course, that hasn’t happened in a long time. Not since he learned how to cry in silence about five years ago, when he was about twelve and almost thirteen.
He doesn’t want her to hear him now.
So he snags his phone from the bedside table as he continues to ignore how badly he is hyperventilating and types.
[scarface -> Big Waffle Energy] hey are you home
Stupid question, of course he’s home.
[scarface -> Big Waffle Energy] are you awake
Probably not.
[scarface -> Big Waffle Energy] can I come over
Again, probably not.
But Shouto does not wait for a reply. Instead he yanks open his window, ignores how hard it is raining, and shimmies his way down the outer wall of his house. His bare feet his the cold grass and he ignores it. He stuffs his phone into his pants pocket and goes off running.
Pretty soon, his hair is plastered to his head and he can’t see through the rain and his tears and he can’t breathe around the hiccups shaking their way up his throat but he keeps running.
He has to.
———
[scarface -> Big Waffle Energy] please, I need you to answer
[scarface -> Big Waffle Energy] please please please I need you to answer
[scarface -> Big Waffle Energy] I can’t see the screen
[scarface -> Big Waffle Energy] I’m going to be at your front door in two minutes please don’t be mad at me you can’t be mad at me or I might-
[scarface -> Big Waffle Energy] or I might break please just don’t be mad at me until morning
———
As soon as the door is open, after several minutes of desperate knocking, Shouto engulfs Katsuki in a desperate hug, pressing his tear stained face into the crook of Katsuki’s neck and wrapping his arms around his waist in a desperate attempt to not burst into a fit of sobs again. Katsuki makes a shocked little squeak and shoves at his shoulders but Shouto doesn’t budge.
“Shouto, the fuck is going on?” Katsuki’s demand falls on deaf ears. Shouto can’t hear him. He can’t hear anything but the screaming of the engine and the screaming of his sister in the backseat and the screaming leaving his own mouth that night when blood had dyed snow red and he forgot how to breathe for the first time.
And Shouto sobs.
Just once.
Once.
And Katsuki freezes, hands floating somewhere in the air beside them as Shouto presses closer, desperately seeking out that warmth that Katsuki just gives off like a generous campfire. He presses his soaked cheeks into the crook of Katsuki’s neck as more tears work their way from his eyes and down his face and onto Katsuki’s bare shoulder. His shoulder is only bare because Shouto grabbing him had only served to dislodge the shirt that was already haphazardly draped over Katsuki’s shoulders. The shirt had already been too big for him because it’s Shouto’s shirt, from when he had left one here and never been bothered enough to get it back.
Katsuki smells good, like he always does, and Shouto clings to him, knees beginning to go weak as more sobs slowly find their way into Katsuki’s shoulder.
“Shouto-”
“Can I come in?” His words are sobs, “Please?”
“Yeah.” Katsuki’s hands finally touch his back and they guide him inside, “Yeah, sure.”
The door closes and Shouto’s knees give out.
“Shouto, what the fuck is happening to you?” Katsuki demands, hands gentle in his hair as Shouto buries his face in Katsuki’s stomach, crying harder.
Katsuki has never seen him cry like this before. He’s seen him cry, sure, that one evening by the bridge a few months ago, but he has never seen him sob, wail, cling to the nearest object of comfort for dear life and cry with all the unadulterated emotion of an infant separated from it’s mother.
“Shouto,” Katsuki is kneeling now, cradling Shouto’s tear stained face in his hands, trying to get Shouto to look at him. Shouto doesn’t oblige, eyes barely open, staring down at the floor as more boiling hot tears roll down his cheeks, wetting Katsuki’s hands.
“Shouto,” Katsuki says again, more insistently this time, “Fucking look at me.”
Shouto does not oblige, fighting Katsuki’s grip. He wants to go back to hugging him, just seize him by his waist and cry against him until he can cry no more, until he feels nothing else, until he is numb and can finally pass out into a dreamless, restless sleep that will do him no good.
“Shouto, can you at least tell me what’s wrong?” Katsuki begs.
“Nightmare.” Is all Shouto can say, voice cracking too violently afterwards to even attempt to complete a sentence.
“About what?” Katsuki prompts him, sleepiness leaking into his voice and Shouto is struck with a bolt of guilt. He shouldn't have come. He should have stayed home and dealt with it alone like he always does.
“Mom.” Shouto blurts and suddenly words are spilling out of him, “It’s always about mom, every single one of them is always about mom and that night. Everything I could have done better, everything I could have done to help, everything I could have done to help her not get hurt. It’s always the same-”
Shouto breaks and dissolves into a vaguely human shaped and tattoo covered pile of sobs and tears and moans of pain. He crumples forward and Katsuki catches him and lets him cling to him. And so Shouto clings to him so hard his hands fist in Katsuki’s shirt that’s really his. His knuckles go white with how tight he is clinging to him and he once again can’t breathe. But now he can hear Katsuki’s heartbeat and it’s calming, soothing, steady, and Shouto latches onto it like it’s a rock in the middle of a massive stormy sea as he pants for air as he tries not to drown.
———
At some point, they made it to the bed and Shouto drifted in and out of consciousness for an hour or two. Katsuki, as he informed Shouto when Shouto was more solidly conscious, remained awake for the entire time because he was ‘worried as shit you absolute fucking idiot.’
Now, though, Shouto’s hands are balled in the front of Katsuki’s borrowed shirt, face pressed into his collarbone as Katsuki runs his hand through Shouto’s nearly dried hair. Katsuki hadn’t mentioned toweling him off and he certainly hadn’t forced Shouto to dry himself off, and Shouto is oddly grateful for it.
“Shouto,” Katsuki’s voice is rough, “Can you tell me what happened now?”
And so Shouto tells him, dam broken clean through. Words spill from his lips and Katsuki remains silent the whole time. He tells of the ghost that haunts him, the ghost he talks to so often, the ghost that Katsuki had found him screaming at that one evening on the bridge, the ghost of his late mother. And Katsuki listens. Shouto is grateful for that too.
When he is finished his story, Katsuki remains silent for four painful seconds before he presses his lips to Shouto’s hair and whispers, “I’m going to fight your father.”
“I hate to break it to you but you would lose spectacularly.” Shouto whispers, the wordiest sentence he has said all night, aside from the story itself.
“I know.” Katsuki admits, arms looping around Shouto and pulling him impossibly closer, “But I can still try.”
Shouto hugs him just as tight, “Please don’t. He already took someone who was important to me. I couldn’t bear to lose you too.”
“You won’t.”
“Huh?”
Katsuki’s ruby red eyes would be sparking with determination if Shouto could see them, “You won’t lose me.”
“Oh.” Shouto breathes.
“Yeah, dipshit, you’re kind of stuck with me.”
Shouto laughs.
It’s the best feeling in the world.
———
“Shouto, it’s too dark.”
“I know, I’m trying to find a safe place to pull over.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
“...”
“...”
“Shouto. Shouto LOOK OUT!”
Crash.