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When Kenma wakes up, the first thing he realizes is that Shouyou isn’t curled up at his side.
The sun’s creeping in through the partially shut blinds, casting a linear early golden glow across the bed, bits of stray dust floating amidst the shine. Kenma blinks, adjusting his sight to the brightness, and rubs away the sleep crusted at the corners of his eyes. He can tell it’s early morning, eight or nine at least, and he never wakes up this early.
But he’s oddly awake and Shouyou isn’t there.
He’s usually [always] right next to Kenma when he wakes up, but he’s not.
He’s not even in their bedroom.
Kenma forces himself to get out of bed. What’s usually a twenty-minute process of wanting to get up, but not moving an inch, is condensed to a few seconds. All because Shouyou’s not next to him.
“Shou?” Kenma calls, peeking his out from their bedroom door to look into the hall.
The lull of morning silence greets him. His heart starts to pick up the pace.
It’s fine, it’s definitely fine. Shouyou wouldn’t just up and leave. Not like that. Not out of nowhere. Really, Shouyou wouldn’t leave at all.
Kenma’s feet drag along the wooden floor of their hallway. He turns into the living room to see nothing. Checks the bathroom, nothing.
He tries to not let the worry build-up to the point where it’s uncontrollable, to where he starts to overthink everything that happened yesterday (nothing), or the day before that (nothing), or weeks before that (still nothing). He takes a deep breath and pulls his hair back into a low bun. It’s fine. Seriously, everything’s fine.
And it is, in some sense, because Kenma finds Shouyou in the corner of their kitchen. Something’s off with Shouyou, though. His knees are pulled up to his chest and his arms are tight around them, hugging them closer if that’s even physically possible. Kenma can see the slight trembling in Shouyou’s hands, how his cuticles are tinted red, from either bitting or digging other nails into them.
He’s never seen Shouyou like this. He’s not even sure if he’s ever been in a state such as this, but having been in a position not too different from this one before (multiple times, really), Kenma knows the basics of what to do.
“You okay, Shou?” He asks. He doesn’t move from the other side of the kitchen, just leans on the wall, and watches his boyfriend’s eyes flicker up to stare at him—wide and bubbling with the promise of incoming tears.
“I just woke up and I had to do so many things, but I couldn’t do them fast enough and I got frustrated because it was going all wrong, then I couldn’t breathe so I just sat down and I still can’t breathe, I think, I don’t know. It came out of nowhere,” Shouyou says, words running together so quickly they blend at the ends, mold into a streaked ombre of franticness. Kenma watches his chest rise and fall unevenly, can hear the trembling in his breath.
“Can I hold you?” he asks lowly. He extends a slow hand in Shouyou’s direction, trying to stay both calm and careful.
When Shouyou nods, Kenma crosses the kitchen and settles onto the floor beside him, then wraps an arm around his shoulder. There’s an urge to pull Shouyou into him, to let his head fall onto his shoulder and course his fingers through Shouyou’s hair, but Kenma shoves it to the back of his mind. What Shouyou needs right now isn’t physical affirmation, he needs to talk.
Kenma’s well aware that nobody’s ever picked up on Shouyou’s frantic nature, how he pushes himself to the extreme, and then beyond that horizon—how he starts something and then never stops, doesn’t know how to stop, refuses to even pause in his efforts to get things done. But Kenma’s seen it all. He’s seen Shouyou fidget and bounce on the balls of his feet and be so loud to mask things all too similar to Kenma’s own internal struggles.
He knows exactly what this is, but he doesn’t want to push Shouyou. Pushing him will only make things worse. Kenma’s been in the position of getting pushed into expressing himself and digging into his inner thoughts and it went horribly. Maybe Shouyou could handle being shoved a bit, but Kenma’s not going to test the theory.
“You got frustrated?” Kenma opens the air for Shouyou to keep talking, to start working it out for himself.
“Yeah,” he says with a small nod, “but not like regular frustrated, y’know? My skin was all… tingly and weird and I couldn’t stop shaking. That’s weird, isn’t it?”
“It’s not weird,” Kenma says quickly. Shouyou flinches at the way Kenma speaks, so he repeats himself in a calmer tone.
“It’s not weird.”
“You sure?”
“Positive.”
“Okay.”
Kenma can feel Shouyou taking deep breaths and he rubs the side of his shoulder with a worried frown. To say that he hates seeing Shouyou like this would be a drastic understatement, but not even in the sense of him panicking. He hates that Shouyou’s questioning it like it’s a bad thing like it isn’t okay when it’s something that can’t even be controlled.
“Why am I acting like this?” Shouyou asks, leaning his head onto Kenma’s shoulder. “I don’t like it.”
“Well,” Kenma says after inhaling and exhaling to pick out his words carefully. There are myriad ways to go about this, and Kenma can’t say for sure exactly what’s wrong with Shouyou, but he has a really solid idea. “I think you might have anxiety.”
“Like you?”
Kenma nods, “Like me, but not exactly the same thing. Anxiety can… manifest and affect people in different ways.”
“Oh.”
“Mine makes me dig really into myself,” he continues, “you know that, I get quiet and reclusive or whatever, but there are some people who get really jittery and frantic, I guess, when their anxiety acts up. Like they have to fix the whole world or it’ll fall apart in their palm. Maybe that could be what’s happening, but I don’t want to say for sure.”
Shouyou sits in silence and Kenma can see the realization slowly wash over him in the gentle waves of Kenma’s voice.
The quiet drifts in the gaps between them and Kenma does nothing to break it. He just holds Shouyou and lets him think everything over. As he said, there’s no definite answer to give Shouyou right now, just things to consider and work through.
“This is normal, though, right?” Shouyou asks, glancing up at Kenma.
“For a lot of people, yeah, it’s normal. You’re not suddenly weird or abstract just because you might have anxiety. A lot of people struggle with it. You don’t think I’m weird, do you?”
“I mean, you’re kinda weird.” Shouyou cracks a smile and Kenma doesn’t even bother to scrunch up his face in a playful offense. He’d set himself up for that one, anyway.
“Shut up,” he says instead, matching Shouyou’s grin.
A contemplating expression takes over Shouyou’s face again and he drops his gaze to the floor.
“What if I want to… figure more things out?” he asks after a couple of seconds pass.
Kenma presses a gentle kiss to Shouyou’s temple, then presses cheek against the top of Shouyou’s head and says, “We can look into it.”