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There's a roll-up futon tucked into the corner of Ritsu's room.
It leans against a bookshelf, hidden away quiet. He doesn't know how it got there, how Ritsu got it or bought it or found it. How he pulled it up the narrow stairway without denting the walls or whether his parents and brother are aware of it or not.
It's been there since Shou started crawling in through his window late at night, afraid to impose on his family but more afraid to go anywhere else.
Late nights of being too small under open stars that don't stare back, hours of being stuck in his head, yet out of his own body all the same. Both on days of the silence beside him being filled with Ritsu's voice and his body and his presence, only for them to fall asleep side by side with the silent futon staying still and forgotten. Or on days that are the summary of weeks where Shou couldn't speak to anyone or walk down streets without looking over his shoulder or feeling the nonexistent press of stares and eyes and thoughts on him that didn't actually exist.
On those days of radio silence on Shou's end, that leave him pressing his hands against the cool glass of Ritsu's window pane, he falls into Ritsu's room to find the futon laid out beside Ritsu's bed. Either made up or with pillows and blankets strewn over, depending on how late it had been laid out.
It's never spoken of. Never brought up or questioned. Shou doesn't ask when he started laying it out or why or if he preps the futon for him even on days that Ritsu doesn't wake to tripping over Shou's form.
He doesn't ask. Just lets the loud words coalesce in the spaces between Ritsu's breath as Shou watches the rise and fall of his chest. He says nothing verbal, only speaking in the way Shou lays to sleep in a mirror of how Ritsu lays, as if the hand curled to Ritsu's chest was clutched in his own.
Shou has never slept in a more comfortable bed.
He couldn’t call himself tactile. Not in the traditional sense.
Open palms smacked across the back with a heavy laugh, hands hard down on his shoulder. The feeling of knuckles and spikes of power and harsh eyes leaving invisible marks on his skin that he can only hope to never feel.
Shou took what he could. Picked the pieces of each touch, molded it to something that felt less harsh.
Ritsu saw how he flinched before leaning in when he touched Shou.
Knuckles first to brush against the fabric of his shirt, his arm, his own hand. Small touches that Shou learned how to accept and feel and lean into without wincing.
Ritsu threaded fingers through his hair like gusts of wind. He looked at him with soft expressions that felt of the glow of the sun, aimed straight at the stretch of his heart.
Shou wasn’t tactile, but he found tears in his eyes and a stinging vine wrapped around his ribs that stung so sweetly. He felt his rock bones give way to magma and his blood run free as sparks in his veins and his head swirl with something vicious in how it makes his whole body ache.
Ritsu wasn’t tactile. He never reached out. Hands kept close to himself and rough against his sides and never one to hold or reach or grasp out. He was content without. Shou found himself opposing that.
Yet Shou found himself familiar with the fabric of Ritsu’s skin. He found hands on his own and fingers along the line of his shoulder and pulling at the edges of his sleeves. He feels the outline of Ritsu’s palm against his spine. The brush of Ritus’s hair against his cheek as Ritsu leans across him. The heavy weight of Ritsu’s head on his shoulder. Breath against the soft of his neck.
Shou wants to ask.
Is it intentional? Does Ritsu know? Is it only with him, that he does this? Does Ritsu let Teruki lean against his bed and say so much of nothing while running fingers against his scalp? Does Tome know what Ritsu’s voice feels like against her back, as Ritsu leans heavily onto her and talks about his day? Is Shou a one and only in this?
“Why do you do that?” Shou would say, while watching a movie with Ritsu without actually seeing any of it, while Ritsu lays his head across his lap.
“Because it makes you happy,” Ritsu would say, or Shou hopes he would say.
Instead he stays quiet, melting into the soft velvet of Ritsu’s skin with every soft touch, more afraid to hear that this isn’t a gift Ritsu gifts him and him alone, every single day.
Instead Shou dreams of keeping Ritsu close and closer to him than anyone else, of saying words he won’t say to himself even yet.
It burns at his stomach. Words, questions, deep in the confines of his body. Singing through the flesh of him, from his nerves and out into the liquid of his aura.
He talks, and talks and talks and talks, without break or pause or a moment of breath, in hopes it’ll chase away what he really wants to say to Ritsu. What he’s wanted to say for so long.
Fingers are in his hair. They pull at him, yanking at the threads of his mind, of his heart, up through his neck and his scalp. Shou scrambles to keep it all deep down.
“....So I was thinking, like, why not be superheroes? Like I figured I could do it no problem but there's that whole masks thing that would suck. I mean, I don’t want to mess up my hair every single time I decide to kick ass and take names but also like why wear a mask at all? Why do any superheroes even wear masks? Wouldn’t that get in…”
His words stop. Ritsu’s movements, meticulous in their rhythms, stop as well. Nerves coil in Shou’s gut. They’re bitter, acidic.
“You haven’t said anything.” Shou digs an elbow into the mattress and tilts his head back. Ritsu is already staring at him. “You haven’t interrupted or told me to shut up yet. Why?”
His skin turns flushed pink. Shou stares, shameless. Ritsu looks away. “Don’t you get tired of hearin’ me talk about nothing?”
“No,” Ritsu says so quickly, he makes himself jump. But he meets Shou’s gaze and his eyes hold something so fierce. “N...no. I could never get tired of listening to you, Shou. I like your voice. It’s… nice.”
Shou’s heart swells to bursting.
He loses track of how he moves, how he gets up on the bed with Ritsu and grabs his shoulders with fingers grasping Ritsu like he was afraid he’d slip away. He doesn’t feel the dip of the mattress or how the blankets feel all wrinkled and bunched under them.
He feels his heart, pumping and beating and pounding at the bars of his ribcage. He sees Ritsu, his eyes his hair his nose his lips his everything. He feels his breath, the words he said to him, the ways he’s looked at him and talked to him and been with him since they had met.
“I’m going to kiss you. Stop me,” Shou stays. And his words feel weighted with what has tangled up his throat. “Stop me, right now.”
Ritsu looks back, confused, then his eyes widen and his aura flares, his breath hitches. “No.”
Shou doesn’t say anything else, not verbally. He says it in the ways he presses the words ‘I love you’ to Ritsu’s mouth, how Ritsu accepts his unsaid confession with a gasp and a lean into him.
The soft of his lips are the softest thing he’s ever felt.