Work Text:
As the sun slowly descends from view from his bedroom window, Katsuki feels the effects of his nonstop working. His back is stiff, eyes strained, and fingers aching from their continuous fixed stretch over his keyboard. On the plus side, he's finished his eighth report out of the twelve he decided to take home with him, and he takes a moment to push his frames atop his head and stretch back against the firm backrest of his chair.
His spine cracks in three places, releasing tension, though a dull ache remains. A sigh escapes his lips, nonetheless, and he curls over his desk again to click onto his next report sheet. The creak of the floor goes unnoticed over his much louder mouse clicks.
“Katsuki?”
Grown used to the voice of his husband over the years, he immediately notes the lack of his usual playful mirth. Katsuki turns to that voice, glasses off, chair groaning under the sudden movement. Eijirou stands in the doorway outlined by the light pouring in from the hall. A brilliant orange burns through their home and brings a glowy highlight to Eijirou’s face, weathered with age and scarred from battles that have come to past.
“Eijirou,” says Katsuki. His husband strays further into their shared room. Katsuki reaches for him when he draws near enough to wrap his arms around his waist and nuzzle his head into his side. Fingers run precariously through fuzzy blond spikes; Katsuki mewls at the mercy of Eijirou’s warm hand. His other pats up the length of Katsuki’s arm until his fingers curl under his chin and force him to look up. Katsuki peers at him over a mound of muscle.
“Almost finished?”
“Almost,” replies Katsuki. A gentle scratch at the back of his neck has his eyes drooping too low for too long to be considered a blink. Above him, Eijirou hums.
“You should take a break, Katsuki.” Katsuki grumbles as his response. Ei sighs. “I mean it. It's getting late and I need help with dinner.”
Again, Katsuki grumbles something barely coherent. Eijirou’s fingers leave his scalp as punishment, and he whines.
“ Katsuki ,” Eijirou says in a firm tone, one he's only ever heard whenever he's scolding one of their kids. Katsuki immediately tenses, nose wrinkling as he cracks an eye open to confirm his husband’s visible irritation.
“Five more minutes,” Katsuki pleads softly. “I'll wrap everything up in five minutes.”
“No, I need you now .” Eijirou frees himself from his husband’s grasp and Katsuki sags in defeat. He abides by Eijirou’s demand, turning from him briefly to close the lid of his laptop after unplugging his flash drive. Katsuki folds his glasses, returning them to their respective casing, then faces Eijirou again.
The fleeting sun bathes his skin in brassy gold, blurring the fine lines of age Katsuki oftentimes traces his fingers over whilst Eijirou slumbers. Despite the slight scowl plaguing the features he's grown to love over the years, his husband’s looks are as enamoring as they were the day he decided this is what he wanted to wake up to every morning for the rest of his life.
“Are you even listening to me?” Eijirou says all too suddenly. It dawns upon him that he's been talking to him for quite some time, and Katsuki folds his lips.
“Yeah, of course,” he lies, though he can sense Eijirou’s disbelief through his sigh.
“What did I just say, then?”
“Uh…” Katsuki licks through the fold in his lips. “How much you love me?”
“Katsuki… No.”
Katsuki feigns dejection. “So, you don't love me?”
“If I didn't, I wouldn't have stuck with your stubborn ass for ten years,” Eijirou says with a roll of his eyes, though a grin soon replaces his earlier scowl. He cups Katsuki’s chin and leans down to place a sweet kiss at the corner of his mouth. Kat revels in the warmth of his affectionate gesture before the dreadful weight of his next few words dawn on him—“We should visit your mother.”
Katsuki blinks. “What?”
“Kats—”
“No, Ei! I…” Katsuki realizes his voice is levels too loud; he pauses, sinking back into his chair. “I can’t,” slips through his lips softly as he stares off into a darkening corner of the room.
“You said you would,” Eijirou reminds him, and he did—Katsuki did say he’d see his mother one of these days. He said that every month of every year, and each of those days he’d find ways to put it off. Whether it be drowning himself in work or watching after his and Eijirou’s three little rugrats, Katsuki placed speaking to his mother at the very bottom of his priorities. It was always ‘tomorrow’, and all those ‘tomorrow’s led to him not speaking to her for years .
Hell, Katsuki couldn't even recall the year he cut contact from her; he and Eijirou were just starting out when they had their falling out. The details of that day were so hazy now…
“I know what I said, but—” Katsuki digs his nails into leather cushioning and gnaws his lip with a huff. Eijirou watches him and waits for another one of his excuses with an expectant half-lidded gaze. Annoyance , Katsuki corrects. Katsuki swallows hard at the revelation and peers up at his husband. “I don’t really have a choice, do I?”
“You always have a choice, Katsuki,” assures Eijirou with a soft press of lips to his temple. His calloused fingers return to the base of Katsuki’s neck as a gentle smile graces his face.
“But is it the right one?” Katsuki thinks to ask. Instead, he leans into his husband’s touch with a hum and leaves tomorrow’s troubling anxieties to tomorrow’s version of him.
• • •
Katsuki wakes to a new day, another warm morning he spends wedged into the firm mass of Eijirou’s side.
Eijirou rests comfortably, his hair a disheveled mess on his pillow, a stream of drool trickling from his gaping mouth, chest rising and falling rhythmic with the gentle thrum of his heart beneath his skin. Each of Katsuki’s blinks is like a camera shutter capturing the moment, and he would have reached for his phone to do so in actuality, too, but Eijirou’s heavy arm on his waist keeps him rooted to the bed. Not that Katsuki minds it much; he’d much rather laze around in bed and count all of the fresh summer freckles splashed across the expanse of Eijirou’s skin until the other awakens. Then, they could spend another long hour together staving off their lingering fatigue with subtle touches, quiet whispers, and fleeting kisses.
It's a passing thought, or a wish, perhaps, that makes Katsuki pinch at Eijirou’s side until he stirs in his sleep and awaken with a breathy chuckle. Eijirou rolls them over in one fluid motion, the soft cast of his shadow gently stretching up the length of the wall where he hovers over Katsuki. He sighs, blinking languidly, looking, but not truly seeing. Or perhaps he is, spending more time scrutinizing the smallest of details; the new and old scars decorating his husband’s lean frame like stripes on a tiger. Eijirou’s thumb brushes across one in particular, a plump welt that stretched across most of his pec and disappears dangerously close to Katsuki’s neck. He leans down to kiss it, following the curve of its natural trail until his lips brush against the skin beneath Katsuki’s ear and a gravelly “Good mornin’” is mumbled between a brief kiss.
Katsuki shivers through his own terse “Mornin’” while angling himself to capture Eijirou’s second kiss with his mouth. He licks into him, humming at the taste of dark roast and hazelnut creamer. “You taste like coffee,” he comments, chasing the flavor of warm. Eijirou grimaces, pinching his lips together as he jerks his head to the side.
“And you taste like cottonmouth.”
“Fuck you.”
Eijirou chuckles and makes himself comfortable nestled between Katsuki’s thighs, his head resting on the lower part of his stomach. “Too tired,” he mumbles.
Katsuki huffs, a private smile gracing his features while fingers thread into a nest of crimson. It's a quiet moment; Eijirou’s muted hums at the fingers in his scalp simmer down to gentle puffs of air fanning across Katsuki’s skin. Katsuki continues his languid circles until he reaches the base of Eijirou’s neck and twirls the shortest tuft of hair nestled there. He’s convinced his husband had fallen asleep where he lay, but Eijirou’s groggy voice cuts through their comfortable silence.
“By the way, I ain't forget what we're doin’ today,” he says, and Katsuki pauses his ministrations when he shifts to a more comfortable position.
“Grocery shopping?” asks Katsuki as he takes to smoothing Eijirou’s hair back from his forehead. Eijirou’s eyes narrow at him.
“No.”
“Filing taxes?”
“Katsuki.”
He smirks at the use of his given name and at Eijirou’s deadened stare, forehead pinched slightly at the center as it commonly is whenever Katsuki decides to try his luck in humor. Poorly timed humor, but still humor. “If it's not related to anything in this household—” Katsuki pokes at the deepest crease in Eijirou’s frown. “—it ain't important.”
“You're wrong, but I'm too tired to argue with you right now,” Eijirou says with a roll of his eyes. He returns to his earlier resting position, curling his arms around narrow, naked hips. Face to the sun, he stares through lashes toasted blond and eyes that held a mellow flame.
“You could call, at the very least,” he adds after a beat. Katsuki grunts.
“Yeah. Maybe tomorrow.”
“ Tomorrow ,” echoes Eijirou. Katsuki is quick to come up with a retort in his head, but keeps it to himself when Eijirou’s eyes crinkle closed and his mouth falls open in a soundless yawn.
And then his mind wanders to a similar moment his parents had shared before; at a time and morning much like the one he shares with Eijirou now. Katsuki himself was young at the time, a young tyke, tired and sluggish from an early rise. Gnawing hunger is what drove him to leave the comfort of his bed to seek out his parents, seeing that he was too small to reach their cabinets at the time. Their room was quiet, expected since the sun was just beginning to climb through their window, and Katsuki feared that he'd have to go through the trouble of waking them up. And so, he gingerly cracks open their door, pausing on every creak that croaked from rusting hinges. His head pokes through the widening gap to survey the room.
There lays his parents, his father asleep whilst his mother comforts him from above, cradling his head with fingers scratching softly through his scalp. She smiled down at him for reasons unknown to Katsuki, a foreign something he didn't understand until he found his own version of the sun and fell in love with its warmth. He thought himself invisible to the scene, content with staying half-hidden behind the door to simply watch.
And that leads Katsuki to think about his and Eijirou’s kids, if they're just as curious as Katsuki was when he was their age. What would they see if they ever find themselves hiding behind their bedroom door?
Katsuki knew he didn't have the best relationship with Mitsuki growing up, but maybe that's a fault they both shared. Despite her shortcomings, he could never truly hate her. She makes up half of who he is—in his behavior and actions, and moments like this where he catches himself reflecting a scene he once witnessed. Her influence on him is something he'll never be able to shake, because truthfully, the apple never falls too far from the tree.