Chapter Text
It’s the lonely kind of hours tonight.
Shinsou’s unfortunately familiar with them, too. The way they tint everything purple and blue, make the bedroom look like a bruise. It’s the quiet desolate state of things, where you’re just kind of lying in your bed, emptied out, with nothing there to distract you from yourself, your thoughts. Your mind’s scooped out of you and set on fire, like it’s burning you alive. The moon seems almost eye-like in the sky, staring daggers into you. Those hours, which seem to swallow you whole.
It sucks, because he can never really get used to this alone-in-his-head routine either, can never manage to will himself to sleep, and it makes Shinsou kind of wish that his quirk worked on his own mind so he could just bippity-boppity-boop up some nap time. It doesn’t, so.
There’s not much complaining to be done, anyway. Everyone’s got their crosses and everyone’s got their Calvary. You carry that bitch or it crushes you, it’s how it is.
But tonight’s extra-special. An occasion, one might call it, because he’s three insomnia pills in and has just woken up from this absolute. Bitch. Of a nightmare.
Sure, he couldn’t remember much of it, but it mostly a feeling, like being locked away, pure distilled isolation. Being trapped and alone, surrounded by cold, cloying air filling his lungs the way water would to someone drowning, stealing Shinsou’s breath right out of him. There were these flashing images, blinking in and out of view, of long teeth and cold eyes, clammy hands pushing him, far away from home or help.
So yeah, extra-special.
Shinsou hates getting nightmares. enough to rank above his hatred of lonely hours, the way they peel you apart to your most vulnerable, churn your gut into paste. So, he gets some hand-wrap, a pair of well-worn workout shoes, and a half-empty bottle of water with plastic melting off the inside surface from being left in the sun.
Where he’s going is one of his favorite frustration-venting places (beating off never really did it for him). Full of equipment, prepared for use at any time, even 3 a.m. flights of fancy, it’s the perfect spot to be to punch your feelings out. Lonely hours can’t touch Shinsou there. Cursing the way the floor creaks outside his door, Shinsou sets off for Gym Gamma.
The hardest part about sneaking out is probably just avoiding all the damn security cameras. Teachers around the clock are watching the feed, so you just got to keep to the shadows and know where to step. Around this time, Aizawa was probably watching, and he’s a good teacher and all, but extremely prone to napping on the job, which there was a high chance of him doing now. Honestly, whoever put him on the night shift was seriously just asking for it.
Shinsou ducks and weaves through the halls, carefully listening to the tell-tale sound of the cameras whirring, blinking red lights in the dim. Call him lame, but sneaking out to the gym has always been nearly as fun as the actual gym-time itself. It’s kind of comforting too, pretending you’re part of a high-stakes mission and not just running off because you can’t get a good enough handle on your fucking feelings to keep from punching them out.
Then, somewhere behind him, Shinsou hears soft, muffled footsteps.
His heart jolts in his chest, suddenly kicking up a thundering beat that echoes through him. It’s annoying because it’s seems so loud it’s inconveniencing his hearing, and Shinsou has to take long deep breaths to calm himself, which is hard to do quietly. He keeps in place until he hears them again, the muffled footsteps, slowly getting louder, and Shinsou closes his eyes, cutting off everything but his hearing, so when it happens a third time, he knows it’s right behind his corner, a little way down the hall. After a moment of mental preparation, he looks carefully around the wall and what he sees just freezes his blood on sight.
It’s some hunched dark thing, in an almost squat position, resting on it’s legs. It’s far enough away in the shadows that the security camera probably isn’t picking it up and Shinsou can’t quite discern it. For a wild second he considers trying to talk to it, to try and get it under his mind control, whatever it is. But, then again, what if it isn’t even human?
‘Idiot’, Shinsou thinks, or tries to think, above the racing of his thoughts. ‘Of course it’s human. This isn’t the fucking Conjuring, of course it’s human.’
Maybe...maybe a villain?.
Shinsou thinks of the stories told, a long time back, about a training camp that the hero courses went to. Where the were ambushed by the League, where one of them was captured. His breathing picks up.
Then the thing moves, just a little bit, and the moonlight coming through the window slants over it, revealing bone-white, knifelike teeth and burning-coal eyes, the pupils pool-dark and wide in the light. The hair on it’s head is fire-engine-red, blood-red and-
Wait a damn minute.
Shark teeth, red eyes and hair.
Oh my fucking God.
And, all at once, and with a terrible sense of finality, like being lowered into a grave, Shinsou knows who ‘it’ is.
“Kirishima?”, Shinsou hisses across the dark hall, before his brain can really catch up. In the shadow, red eyes widen comically, and the serrated, sawtooth teeth move in a way that means the guy’s probably gawking at him, open-mouthed. He’s decked out in what looks like a maroon tank top, the words ‘keep calm and be manly’ emblazoned on it, and dark gray sweats. A red elastic sports headband completes the getup, making him look like some fitness trainer with punk-rock influence. His hair is down and it frames his face in waves of thick red, which is kind of jarring in it’s difference from his normal ‘do.
“Dude.” he whispers back, and yup, it’s definitely Kirishima. “Holy shit, I thought you were a ghost.”
“What the hell are you doing!”, Shinsou narrows his eyes at the other boy, still staring back at him, wide-eyed. “It’s 3 a.m.!”
“I could ask you the same thing man!”, Kirishima bunches up, going taut, a runner before the race. “Hold up. I’m coming over.”
“No.” Shinsou frantically flaps his hands, while trying to keep away from the cameras. “No, no, no, wait.”
Kirishima, being, you know, Kirishima, starts doing these series of clumsy somersault rolls across the hall, almost falling on his side at least three times. A bottle, of what appears to be red gatorade, looks like it’s in danger of bursting, he’s clutching it so tightly. On his fourth roll, he just outright falls, and Shinsou puts his head in his hands because jesus what the fuck.
Apparently giving up on the rolling, Kirishima just keeps low and scrambles over, tapping Shinsou on the shoulder, who determinedly doesn’t look up.
“That was awesome.”, he breathes, and Lord, Shinsou wants to hit him. “So, uh, why you up?” His eyes skim over Shinsou, taking in the hand-wrap, shoes, clothes, and they widen, mouth curling into a grin. “Yo! You hitting the gym too?” He holds his fist out, angling for a bump. “Sick. We can go together.”
Shinsou whips up, mouth open in protest, because no, fuck no. Kirishima’s admittedly not the most annoying out of Class 1A, though this encounter may beget a reconsideration of that, but Shinsou cannot have this guy intruding on, fuck it, his ‘me time’! He takes a slow breath, and forces a polite tone into his voice.
“If you don’t mind,” Shinsou starts, tactfully. “I’d like to just-”
“Nah, man, I don’t mind at all!”, Kirishima interrupts easily. He looks around, expression shifting into some weird mixture of caution and excitement. “This is awesome. It’s like we’re spy buddies!”
Shinsou’s eye twitches and a vein pulses in his forehead. “We are not-”
“Let’s go, Shinsou!” Kirishima chuckles at himself. Ha! That rhymed.”
“You-!”, Shinsou sputters. “You...you! Fucking-”
Before he knows it, they whisk off down the corridors, just barely managing to avoid cameras, and Shinsou mentally groans, preparing himself for the inevitable descent of this already horrendous night.
As they scale down the flights of stairs, Shinsou wonders if Kirishima’s ever done this before, and if he did, how on God’s green Earth he ever managed to get away with it. Every opportunity to slide down the stair railings, he takes it. In his excitement, he almost gets caught by multiple security cameras, Shinsou being his only hope of remaining undetected, as cautious as he is. For another, there’s always this strange sort of enormity to him, this natural boisterousness. Maybe it’s in the way he seems to use his whole face when he grins in anticipation. Maybe it’s the way his entire being just bunches before making a run across hall, like he’s somehow charging up.
Or maybe it was just the hair, which was a statement in and of itself. Yeah, it might just be the hair.
Shinsou snaps out of his reverie just in time to stop Kirishima running headlong into the sights of a camera, slamming the other boy to the wall and shushing him. They’re in the commons, opting for a safer method than busting out the main doors and getting caught by the swiveling cameras positioned on either side. Normally bustling with students, but unusually quiet in the night-silence and striped with moonlight, painting milk-white lines along the floor, the commons could almost be considered eerie.
Crouched just a few ways away from a window, just out of the sights of a camera, Shinsou turns to Kirishima and fixes him with a glare.
“On my count, got it?”, he mutters. “And, please, God, no rolling.”
Kirishima gives a quick salute and a excited-wide grin. “You got it, chief.”
“Do not.” Shinsou growls. “Call me chief.
“Sorry, sorry!” Kirishima grins, giddy. “I just thought we could have, like, code names, since we’re being all sneaky, and secret agenty-”
“Please. Shut up.”
“Right.”
The second the camera turns away, they bolt for the window, raising the glass and then the bug-screen. They scramble over, Kirishima tumbling to the ground and Shinsou frantically closing the screen and the window, just in time for it to look normal again.
“Made it.”, Shinsou gasps. A giddy rush of adrenaline sparks through him, and he just manages to bite back a wild laugh. Kirishima pulls his phone out of the pocket of his sweats, and checks the time, eyebrows raising.
“In only ten minutes, too! New record!”, Kirishima says. He hops to his feet and offers a hand up, which Shinsou takes. “Fifteen minutes total, if we run to the gym.”
‘Yay, you can do simple math. Good for you’, is what Shinsou kind of wants to say, just to be a bitch. He didn’t put all that work into his hero studies to waste it on 'making nice' with other people, but before he can do anything, Kirishima throws him a wide, challenging kind of grin.
“Race ya!”, he says, and jets off across the grass, making for the hedge, leaving Shinsou no choice but to follow.
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