Work Text:
Fire alarms.
To Mondo, they have always been a good thing. He can always tell it is a drill, and grins when the bell starts ringing, knowing he’s going to get to miss half an hour of classes, stood outside on the playground, waiting to be let back inside. As a kid, he loved the excuse to mess around with his friends, and might even have set the bell off himself a couple of times (but that’s a secret).
But since he joined Hope’s Peak Academy and met Chihiro and Kiyotaka, Mondo has seen another side to the whole situation. Because his boyfriends hate fire alarms. They both find the bell painfully loud, and the stress and crowds totally overwhelm them. In their first year, back before they were friends, he saw Taka freaking out and Chihiro clamping his hands over his head, and had no idea what was going on. But in these last few months, during which they became friends and then boyfriends, he has learned about their autism and sensory issues and understands perfectly why they hate the bell so much.
So when, on the first day of second year, the fire alarm goes off, Mondo sighs rather than grins. As their teacher tries to organise the fifteen students, Mondo turns his head to look at his boyfriends. Chihiro has pulled a big set of headphones over his ears, but still moves stiffly as he gets to his feet. And Taka bites his bottom lip, hands clenched into trembling fists.
In the loosely organised chaos of the evacuation, Mondo hurtles over to Chihiro and grabs his arm, holding firmly so he doesn’t set off sensory issues. He steers the wobbly Chihiro towards Taka, who is tense like a coiled spring, blood trickling from a tear in his lip.
“Come on, guys,” he says, having to yell over the deafening ring of the bell. “Let’s get outside.”
Putting on his ‘don’t mess with me face’, Mondo barges past his classmates and rushes ahead, leading the pair with him. Taka trembles, muscles stiff, whilst Chihiro slumps his shoulders, looking like he wants to sink into the ground. They burst out of the door ahead of the other students, and the reactions are instant. Taka relaxes slightly and Chihiro straightens up, but they’re both just following him along, like they’re asleep standing up.
As they hurried ahead, Mondo knows they should have a couple of minutes before their teacher starts yelling at them to line up on the tennis courts (the location the school uses to do a roll call when they evacuate). So he pulls them around a corner, giving them relative privacy. The bell still rings, but it’s muffled by the walls of the school.
“Guys, are you better now?” he asks.
Chihiro looks up at him, eyes fixed on Mondo’s chin. “Uh… not really. But… thanks for the help.”
As he studies them, it finally clicks. A conversation comes back to him, one where Chihiro and Taka explained two of the things that can happen to them both when either their emotions or their senses overload them. One was called a meltdown (and Mondo has seen one of those; Taka was sobbing and biting himself and totally broken and it was fucking terrifying to watch), and the other was called a shutdown. Chi said they become unresponsive and struggle to speak and seem like they’re trapped inside their own heads…
Is that happening right now?
“Is this… a shutdown?” he asks.
They both look at him, Taka’s head snapping in his direction. Chihiro nods, but then reaches up and rubs his forehead, grimacing in pain. Does he have a headache?
“Yes,” Taka mumbles.
“Are you feeling better out of the noise?”
Taka nods again.
“When will it go away?”
“Can take hours, sometimes,” Chihiro mumbles, hand still resting on his forehead. He rubs his thumb across his eyebrow, still all spaced out. “But… it’ll end. Eventually.”
“Just need… quiet,” Taka says, stammering over his words.
“Oh,” Mondo says. He gets it now. It will take a while for their brains to stop overloading from the noise, and they’ll be like this until then. But as long an even louder noise doesn’t happen, they won’t get any worse. “Okay. Do you wanna hug or something?”
Chihiro looks at him. “Please.”
Taka gives a short nod, stepping forwards. That’s a shock; Taka normally refuses any sort of PDA at school.
But Mondo doesn’t complain. He opens his arms and they both slump against him. Chihiro buries his face into Mondo’s chest, and Taka rests his forehead against Mondo’s chin, both of them clinging to him like he can’t let go.
And Mondo knows he can’t make them feel better, but he can totally stop them getting any worse.
But, seriously, fuck the fire alarm for causing this.