Work Text:
Gakushuu clicked his tongue in annoyance as he hung his coat in the doorway, closing the door behind him a bit too brusquely. His performance had not been satisfying today. Again. He would have to work at home tonight, he needed to catch up, fix it, do better and… His eyes stopped on a bag in the hallway.
“Karma?” he called, his tone weary and suspicious.
He made his way further into the house, and as he was starting to guess, found the redhead packing a suitcase. He leaned in the doorway, glaring at him, and eventually his presence was noticed. The other visibly tensed and looked at him.
“Nice day at work?” he asked in a strained voice.
“Not satisfying. What are you doing?”
“I have a business trip, it shouldn’t be-”
Gakushuu scoffed. “Yeah, a business trip. Absolutely not just running away, as you usually do,” Karma’s eyes immediately lit up at the attack, fists clenching. “Running away from what, exactly? From you? I don’t have to run away from you, you are either at work, or working at home. If I want to run away from you, I can just go in the damn kitchen,”
That struck a nerve, and Gakushuu turned away, slamming the bedroom’s door behind him. He did not leave quick enough to not hear the “Who’s running away now?!” Karma threw at him. He locked himself up in his office, and slumped down on his chair, letting his forehead hit the desk. It was Karma who was running away, as he always did. Never here, always on business trips or god knew where, anything to not be here, because the redhead was absolutely unable to put any significant efforts into anything. Relationships were work , and Karma didn’t do work . Everything had to magically work out, he had to be immediately good at everything, it was just…
Logical . After all, why would he put effort into this relationship? Gakushuu wasn’t good enough. It was never satisfying, everything always seemed to be just within his reach, just within his grasp, yet he always failed a few inches away from it. He was just never good enough, never, ever, ever, ev-
Gakushuu woke up. He stayed frozen for a minute, eyes wide open staring at the ceiling in the dark. He slowly sat up and reached for his phone, checking the time. 3 a.m. He carefully cast the light on the person sleeping next to him, and breathed out. Right. Just 16 years old Karma. Like he was just 16 years old Gakushuu, a high school student.
He needed a cup of coffee. Not like he could fall back asleep anyway.
He had been sitting on the couch for a bit, hands clenched around his hot mug of coffee. The lights were off, the living-room only slightly lit up by the moonlight shining through the windows. He was staring at the black screen of the tv with a frown when he heard the familiar padding of bare feet on the wood floor, and looked behind to see Karma joining him, stifling a yawn, still in his pajamas.
“What’s up?” he asked, and tapped his ear so Gakushuu would know he was wearing his aids and didn’t have to sign.
Not surprising, Karma might hate wearing his aids at home, but he hated even more having to switch on lights in the middle of the night when he just woke up. As they did not possess night vision (a shame), they couldn’t really sign in the dark.
“Weird nightmare,” he shook his head, feeling the couch dip besides him, and turning to face Karma, searching his golden eyes.
“About?”
“The lasting consequences of childhood abuse turning our relationship dysfunctional over time as we sink into reproducing the patterns of our parents,”
Karma stared.
“Most people have nightmares about forgetting to wear pants at school,”
That made Gakushuu relax a bit, a chuckle escaping his lips. He sipped on his coffee and leaned against the redhead, dropping his head against his shoulder for a bit before straightening up.
“We were...Married, and older. You were running away from our relationship, because it was too hard to work on, and you didn’t want to put any actual efforts in it, and I was obsessing over being the best at everything and being completely absent, and expecting you to be alright with it and bear the entire emotional load of our relationship,”
“Absolutely doesn’t sound like what your dad does to you, and what my parents do to me, no,” Karma let out a derisive sound.
It wasn’t like he had never thought of those things. Though usually it was more in the terms of ‘What if I have a child, and become like my parents?’, but he wasn’t interested in having children, and he knew Gakushuu wasn’t either, so he figured he was safe on that end. But there was always each other, of course.
“What says we’ll be better than our parents, Karma?”
He frowned “Well, I know what,” he announced, making Gakushuu raise his eyebrows in surprise. “The bar is so fucking low that an ant couldn’t limbo dance under it,” he grinned. The strawberry blond laughed. “Fair,” he admitted.
A comfortable silence settled between them, though Karma’s mind was running now that Gakushuu had started it. He might have deflected the question, but it didn’t prevent him from thinking about it. What said they’d be better than their parents? He did have a tendency to give up on things that were too hard to work on, when he wasn’t immediately good at it. Koro-sensei had shown him the road to follow to fix that, and he had been working on it since then, but it wasn’t a magic fix, and his social skills weren’t really an area he worked a lot on. That was exactly what his parents did, had a kid for the novelty, realised it was work, and gave up. He frowned.
“We couldn’t have dated, back in middle school,” he pointed out. “We have changed a lot since then. If we had dated back then, it would have blown up fairly quickly, and I think I would have strangled you,”
“I would have strangled you first,”
“No, because I’m stronger, but anyway, it wouldn’t have worked out. But now it’s working out. And, alright, maybe we don’t have yet what it needs to build a solid long-lasting adult relationship, but we are just 16 -and definitely shouldn’t be stressing out about that at 3 a.m, Shuu-, so...We can figure it out as we go. If you turn into the Principal 2 The Smaller But More Evil Return, I’ll call you out on it,”
Gakushuu groaned.
“Right, I’ll call you out too if you start turning into your parents too,”
“Ah! That’d be hard, since I’d be gone,” Karma teased.
“I’d track you down, get you on no-fly lists, and keep you stuck wherever I want until I’m sure you’ve heard a piece of my mind,”
“Duly noted,”