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They’ve been up on the roof for the past hour, just since sunset. Kirishima’s skin prickles as sweat dries under his shirt. They’d taken the chance to spar – playful boxing, taps counting as hits, just enough to get their blood moving and stave off the sharp chill of the December evening while they gave the sky time to darken.
Kirishima doesn’t know yet what Bakugou brought him up here to see, and he doesn’t care. (Hey. Come with me, I’ll show you something fucking cool, he’d said, and Kirishima went.) Anything with Bakugou is enough. And when it’s something new, something even fractionally different, all the better. He could live in each new moment forever. He doesn’t shiver as he cools down, sitting on the edge of the rooftop next to Bakugou, because he’s still memorizing the way it sounded, felt: the soft quick shuffle of their shoes as they feinted, the way the little rasp of Bakugou’s breath seemed to skitter across his skin in the quiet evening, the fade of his face into something indistinct, a pale featureless oval through the blue veil of twilight. How each block, each tap as they danced around one another, felt as hot and fleeting as being peppered with sparks from a fire – searing and then gone in an instant. It all coalesces into a new facet of him, this, them, adding a bright little lens to the myriad already in place somewhere in Kirishima’s core. Shine a light through, and there he’d be, there they’d be, a hologram of a hundred hundred moments, shifting and glittering and pulsing with a life that makes something in him blaze with joy.
Kirishima is happy when he’s with Bakugou. It’s in a way that’s different to ways he’s felt happy before, and somewhere deep in his gut he feels a current of something else that the happiness is riding on, and he’s not sure what, but why dwell on it, he thinks? Of course friends make you happy. Of course some friends make you happy in different ways than others. He deftly puts away the knowledge that he’s felt that same current and moved quickly on from it more times than he can count by now. Why dwell on it if it doesn’t make a difference to anything?
“God it’s fucking cold up here,” Bakugou grumbles.
“It’s December, dude, you shoulda known to bring a better jacket,” Kirishima grins and watches Bakugou rub his arms to warm them through the fabric of his hoodie.
“Yeah well maybe I was expecting you’d be able to give me a better workout than that.”
“Wow, I guess I totally imagined all those hits I landed. Am I hallucinating? Quick, take me to Recovery Girl before I completely lose touch with reality!”
“Shut up,” Bakugou says, but there’s a smile under it. Kirishima stretches, contented, and feels the joints in his shoulders and back pop in a satisfying way.
“So are you going to tell me why we’re up here?”
Bakugou doesn’t respond, but takes his phone out of his pocket. As he unlocks it it illuminates his face, features suddenly sharply picked out in light and shadow against the faintly starry backdrop of the early night sky. Another little facet, another little aspect added to the prism. Kirishima watches and memorizes and feels happy as Bakugou consults something on his phone and then checks the sky, then back again. He squints, checks one more time, then puts his phone away, dipping himself back into the faceless semi-darkness.
“Okay, see the moon?” he says.
Kirishima laughs but obligingly looks up at it. “Yep, hard to miss.”
“Shut up,” Bakugou says again, companionably. He lifts a finger, silhouetted, and traces a line down and right from the bright half moon. “Southwest, about a hand above the horizon.”
“Okay…” Kirishima responds, a little uncertain.
“You see it?”
“That bright star?”
“It’s not a star, that’s Jupiter.”
Kirishima looks back towards Bakugou. “Is there,” he says, “anything that you don’t somehow know more about that everyone else.”
Even without being able to really see his face in the dark, Kirishima can feel Bakugou roll his eyes.
“I barely know fucking anything about star shit, I just picked up a little while studying wilderness survival junk. Stars can be helpful for navigation if you’re lost. Anyways,” he cuts Kirishima off before he can say anything, somehow sensing he’d opened his mouth to say something enthusiastic (how could he not?), “that’s not the point. Look at Jupiter again.”
Kirishima again obliges, and this time notices something.
“There’s something super close to it!”
“Yeah!” Bakugou sounds almost excited, and something lances through Kirishima’s chest, his happiness sparking and that undercurrent moving in the way that it does, in the way that he ignores. Bakugou leans slightly closer to him to align their views and points at the two little dots, one bright and one faint, in the night sky.
“That second one is Saturn. It’s called the Great Conjunction when they get that close, and it only happens once every six hundred fucking years.” He leans back away, leaving an echo of his body heat against Kirishima’s neck. “Wild, right? Told ya it was something fucking cool.”
Kirishima can’t answer. He can’t tear his eyes away.
“Plus you can only see it for an hour or two. It’ll be below the horizon pretty soon.”
“Wow,” Kirishima finally manages, and it comes out croaky and weird and he doesn’t say anything else. He’s staring at the two dots. Looking at them without a telescope, they’re only a hair’s breadth apart, infinitesimally close to touching. Jupiter blazes. The minuscule corona of its light seems like it could brush the faded pinpoint of Saturn beside it, but it doesn’t, not quite. The two planets are millions of miles away from Earth, millions of miles from each other, and from this one spot in this one fraction of a moment, once in six hundred years, they are so close. So close.
The ghost of Bakugou’s warmth on his neck is gone. The dried sweat on his skin pricks and itches. Something in the corner of his eyes prickles too, in a way that makes him feel scared. Why does he feel scared? Why does he feel like he’s on a precipice? Like something he doesn’t want to know is straining against the film between subconscious and conscious? Why is he suddenly so, so, so aware of Bakugou next to him, close but not touching?
“Shoulda brought binoculars or something,” Bakugou gripes, and his voice vibrates across Kirishima’s skin. He wants to stop time, he wants to stop everything before he knows, he wants to live here in the before when Bakugou’s voice makes him shiver and the only thing he feels is happiness and another facet and a current he can ignore, ignore, ignore. “You’re supposed to be able to see a couple of Jupiter’s moons, too.”
Close but not touching, and all he wants, with the force of his entire being, with the force of that current that’s breaking through, broken through, drowning him in a knowing that he can’t unknow no matter how desperately he begs and tries – all he wants is to close the gap with Bakugou, because he —
Close but not touching, and now that he knows, even if they’re as near as the two little lights above them, they’re still as far apart as Jupiter and Saturn, because he can’t. The space between them has become an event horizon Kirishima can never cross again.
Close, but not touching.
He loves Bakugou. And there’s no way, not in six hundred years or millions of miles, that Bakugou would be okay with that.
Kirishima thought he was going to die when he jumped in front of Fat Gum to take Rappa’s attack in the bowels of the Triad’s hideout. Forcing his body past its own paralyzing terror was the hardest thing he’d ever done. This feels, somehow, feels harder.
He blinks rapidly, clearing the sting from his eyes, grateful for the dark, and exhales hard, disguising it as half a laugh.
“Man, you weren’t kidding,” he says, and his voice is steady. Good. “That’s really fucking cool.”
Bakugou snorts and even that makes Kirishima’s heart clench. “I don’t lie to my friends.”
Six hundred years and millions of miles.
“You sure don’t,” Kirishima says, but there’s a slightly hysterical note to it he can’t control, and he laughs again to cover it up. There’s a beat of silence between them, that before would have felt companionable, and now feels like a tightrope only Kirishima can sense, only Kirishima has to walk. He keeps staring at the conjunction, willing his heart to slow down, willing his head to stop feeling weird and light and dizzied, willing Bakugou to say something, to lead this situation in any direction at all, because as long as Bakugou’s leading then Kirishima can just follow and not fuck this up.
“So you got all your shit for backpacking over Christmas?”
Fuck.
“A- Almost!” Shit. “I’m, uh, waiting on that sleeping bag I ordered to come in the mail.”
“You should get a liner too if you don’t have one yet, it’s gonna be cold as shit at night.”
“Right, yeah. You know,” Kirishima interrupts himself a little too quickly to be natural but he can’t help it because he’s dealing with a wildly new context to spending Christmas alone in the mountains in a tent with Bakugou, “We should invite Mina! She’s been asking me about all the hiking stuff a bunch, I think she’d really like it.”
Kirishima can feel Bakugou’s eyes narrowed at him, and he flushes.
“No fucking way, not this time. She doesn’t have the gear or experience for winter shit. You know enough what you’re doing by now. Maybe in the spring,” Bakugou grudgingly adds. Then, “Ugh, I’m freezing my ass off out here. Let’s head back in.”
He stands up and offers a hand to Kirishima. Kirishima’s gaze breaks from the conjunction and stares at the hand, his brain abruptly inundated in a hundred thousand new calculations of touch and communication and normalcy and he has to take it this has to be normal –
Bakugou hauls him up and once standing Kirishima pulls his hand away and stuffs it in his pocket as quickly as possible without it seeming strange. The impression of Bakugou’s fingers against his feels like a burn. They make it back into the warmth of the dorm building, back down to their hallway, to their doors next to one another. They say goodnight like its any other night, even as Kirishima calculates his way through every step and word and breath. He’s never been drunk but he’s been concussed, and he imagines that this is what it’s like when you’re doing everything you can to appear sober despite the swimmy disconnection between your brain and body.
When his door closes behind him he stands there in the dark without turning the light on. He can hear the soft abstract sounds of Bakugou next door getting ready for bed, his door opening and shutting twice more as he leaves to brush his teeth and comes back. It’s been silent a while before Kirishima lies down, fully clothed.
He knows, now, and he can’t not. He has to find a way to deal with this, because the shock of knowing is sublimating into a whole new kind of paralysis that feels far too much like the fear he thought he’d overcome during and after the raid. Overcome with Bakugou’s help. The question circumscribing this new arena is: what is worse? The million miles in that hair’s breadth of distance between them? Or losing him altogether?
Kirishima sits up abruptly. Almost watching his body from the outside, he silently leaves his room and heads back up the rooftop stairs. He emerges into the night alone, and it feels colder than before, the gusty wind cutting through his clothes and raising goosebumps on his arms. He stands on the edge of the roof. The moon has changed positions, but he finds the black silhouetted shape of the horizon near the conjunction. About one hand width up…
The planets are gone from the scatter of stars dusting the sky. The little window, the needle eye through which the planets threaded, has passed.
Six hundred years, but the conjunction will come again.
He can hear Bakugou’s voice. If you just refuse to go down, that means you’re stupidly strong. Kirishima can hold Unbreakable for almost sixty seconds now. He endures - that’s what he does best. Okay, he thinks. Six hundred years.
No problem.