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Tamaki sometimes had a hard time remembering that his room was actually his room. Not that his sense of direction was so bad that he couldn’t find it, but because Mirio looked so comfortable reading on Tamaki’s bed that Tamaki had, every once in a while, got up to “go back to his room” and Mirio had to stop him.
For his part, Mirio had wondered a couple of times if his friend was trying to passively tell him that he was spending way too much time in his room. Those thoughts had quickly been dismissed: he knew Tamaki was too anxious to use such methods, so he ascribed the confusion to the exhaustion of a long afternoon of intense studying. On those occasions he would usually jump off the bed, throw a hand around Tamaki’s shoulders and take him to have dinner, while gently poking fun at him for forgetting that he already was in his room.
That afternoon things were going a little different. As Mirio peacefully did his studying splayed out on the bed, Tamaki was more jittery than usual: he sighed, scratched his head, rubbed his neck, all while bent over his notebook.
He was being vexed by nothing more than an English assignment, but Tamaki had never excelled in the subject and keeping the grades up was proving difficult. He dropped the pen and put his head in his hands, giving in to frustration. He didn’t hear the fabric of the bed covers rustle as Mirio left the bed, so when he heard his voice right next to his ear, he almost head-butted his friend.
“Ah!”
“Whoa!” exclaimed Mirio, jumping back. “I didn’t mean to scare ya! Do you need help?”
Tamaki took a deep breath, trying to calm down his racing heart. He didn’t need those kind of surprises… not when his heart was already doing back flips at the mere sight of his friend. He somehow replied with a tone of voice that could be considered normal, and not at all panicked. At least for his standards.
“Oh. Yeah,” he said.
Mirio leaned over without a world, a hand on Tamaki’s shoulder, the other on his chin as he studied the assignment that he had, most likely, already finished. In that area Mirio was doing better than him. Probably due to all the old interviews of All Might that he had watched with Sir.
He was so close.
“A-ha! The spelling here is wrong, Tamaki. And there should be another tense there,” explained Mirio, pointing at different parts of his friend’s essay.
Tamaki thanked him and quickly fixed the mistakes that Mirio had pointed out, trying at the same time to ignore the hand still clasping his shoulder. He was too close. He could probably brush Mirio’s cheek with his nose if he turned his head. It was tempting in the same way the light of a candle was tempting: he knew he could easily get hurt if he touched it, but what if he didn’t?
“Do you need help finishing it too?” Mirio asked, still comfortably leaning over Tamaki’s shoulder. He wondered if his friend was just that oblivious to how Tamaki was basically vibrating out of his skin. He knew Mirio was not stupid. Was he ignoring it? Pretending not to see it, to spare Tamaki the embarrassment? Did he just not care?
He pushed all those thoughts in the back of his mind and let them run as a background noise, as he focused on Mirio’s instructions. In the end, with Mirio’s help, it took them a little more than half an hour to finish Tamaki’s essay. He looked at the page with more relief for being finally done than satisfaction.
This time he paid attention to how Mirio straightened up and went back to reading on the bed. His hand mindlessly looked for the juice box he kept next to his books as he studied and took a sip, his eyes glued to the essay without really seeing it. He couldn’t do this anymore. He was going to die of a heart attack before he could find the bravery to tell his best friend since third grade that he had a big, fat crush on him. And besides, even if he managed to tell him, what would have that accomplished? Someone like Mirio, so bright and joyful, wouldn’t have worked in a relationship with someone like him. He was already lucky enough to be his friend. He sighed again.
Too caught up in his own self loathing to process his surroundings, Tamaki realized way too late that Mirio was again next to his face, pointing at something on his essay.
“One more thi-“ he managed to say, before Tamaki yelped in surprise, his whole body tensing up and accidentally squeezing his juice box, spraying its contents directly on Mirio’s track jacket.
They both stared at the damp and sweet spot on Mirio’s chest in complete silence and in that moment Tamaki wished he too had the ability to fall through the floor and disappear. Why was that afternoon in particular so bad for his nerves?
After the shock wore off, he quickly left the desk and went looking for napkins.
“I’m so sorry, Mirio, let me just-“ he started, frantically opening and closing various drawers. Mirio let out a surprised laugh.
“Don’t mind! My fault, really. I should stop coming up on you from behind,” he said, taking off his track jacket. The white t-shirt underneath had been spared, at least. Before Tamaki could find anything to give him, Mirio dropped the stained piece of clothing on the floor.
“I’ll pick it up later. There was just one more thing I wanted to tell you about the essay…”
What Mirio wanted to tell him, was simply that there was a better way to reword the first sentence. It was not something worth getting orange juice all over your track jacket, but that was the situation they were in.
Tamaki put away the essay. Maybe his hellish afternoon was also finally done. Maybe he could go back to pretending that Mirio was not laying on his bed in a white t-shirt that left little to the imagination (although, why was that even a reason to get worked up? He had seen Mirio slip out of his clothes more times than he could count. There was no part of his body that he hadn’t already seen). He could now also keep listing all the reasons why he should not tell Mirio that he liked him. Yes, that was a productive way to spend the rest of his time before dinner.
After a while there was a knock at the door.
“Hey, Togata! Are you in there?” asked one of their classmates from outside of Tamaki’s room.
What did it say about them, that their classmates knew Mirio would be in Tamaki’s room and not his own, wondered Tamaki.
He watched as the door of his room closed behind Mirio, not bothering to learn who needed him and why he had to leave. He just stared where a moment before stood his best friend, the muscular frame of his body still imprinted on his mind.
Wait a moment…
His gaze fell on the floor and on the track jacket that had been abandoned there, a memento of his own awkwardness. He engaged in a ruthless staring contest with the inanimate object and lost it. With a sigh he picked the piece of clothing up to fold it. The orange juice had dried off and now the track jacket smelled faintly of sugar and citrus.
He wanted to think that his hands had moved on their own, because he did not want to take responsibility for bringing the jacket up to his nose. And then he was breathing. It’s not like he was trying to figure out Mirio’s smell. He was just... breathing.
There was the scent of generic laundry detergent, the one they could use in the dorms. Apart from that, he could make out another citrusy scent, which did not come from the orange juice. It was lemon? Lemongrass? He couldn’t tell. He knew Mirio had a preference for those perfumes, the ones with a sour hint, not the sweet ones. It made sense in his mind: citrus fruits grew in warm, sunny places, and Mirio was a sun on his own. So of course he liked those scents.
He gripped the fabric of the jacket as he felt a sting of pain in his chest.
“This is embarrassing. I am embarrassing,” he thought. And on top of that he was an idiot and a coward.
But how could you not fall in love with Mirio? He was kind. He was brave. He wanted nothing more than to see the people around him smile. And the most incredible thing was that, for all those years, he had included Tamaki in the group of people that was worth seeing smile. Nobody had ever looked at Tamaki like Mirio did.
He slowly exhaled, still with the jacked pressed against his mouth. He thought about Mirio’s hands fumbling with the zipper, how the jacket had slid off his shoulders to show his muscular arms. His face heated up. He had thought about those hands. He’d had fantasies about those hands. And forearms. And abs. And…
He stopped his train of thoughts as another wave of heat hit his face. Mirio. His friend was the whole reason he knew he liked boys. Or a boy, at least. Feelings were difficult for him. For some time he had even doubted that he could like people that way. Until one day he had looked at Mirio with different eyes and the crush had hit him like a high-speed train. Regardless of the specifics about his sexual orientation, the fact remained that Mirio awoke something inside Tamaki that he had a hard time keeping at bay and that was becoming a problem. What was he supposed to do? He spent the majority of his waking hours with his best friend. There was no way to avoid him and just let the crush fade away.
“Hey, Tamaki, did I forget the jacket here?”
It was a fraction of a moment: the door opened and Tamaki froze on the spot, limbs like granite, as Mirio peered inside. He was sure their eyes had locked, even if just for a second, and as his heartbeat spiked up once again, he did the only thing he could think of: he threw the jacket at Mirio’s face and jumped to close the door in his friend’s face.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” he told himself, glued to the door and waiting for the people outside to leave.
There was some muttering outside, but the sound of his heart hammering in his chest was too loud to make anything out, but he did hear the footsteps of at least two people move away.
He needed to talk to someone, as soon as possible. And he knew who the right person was.
-
“Oh? He should be in his room on the fourth floor,” kindly explained Midoriya.
Tamaki thanked his underclassman and went looking for the room. He could have talked to Nejire, but as much as he loved her, he couldn’t trust her not to accidentally tell Mirio his secret. No, he needed someone else. Someone he knew well enough, but wasn’t close with the rest of Tamaki’s class.
It was a few days after the clothes smelling accident and he had done his best to avoid Mirio or, at worst, pretend nothing had happened that afternoon. It was an endeavor trying not to spend time with his best friend, but he knew himself well enough to realize there was no way he was able to behave normally in his presence. The worst had been avoiding being alone with him. What if he had brought up the jacket? Maybe he was waiting for a moment where it was just the two of them to ask him what was going on.
He found the name he was looking for and knocked on the door. But it wasn’t Kirishima who opened the door.
“What?” asked Bakugo.
“Uh…” Tamaki knew Bakugo. He knew about his reputation and terrible personality. And he also knew that, somehow, he was Kirishima’s boyfriend, because the boy couldn’t shut up about it. Fat Gum never had the heart to stop his ramblings even when they happened at the most inappropriate times. “I was looking for Kirishima,” he said.
“He’s not here,” said Bakugo.
They stared at each other in silence.
“How?” thought Tamaki. “How did you, of all people, manage to pull Kirishima?”
“And… when will he be back?” he tried.
“Amajiki-senpai!” he heard a familiar voice exclaim.
Kirishima did a light jog from the end of the hallway, rescuing his upperclassman from having to interact alone with Bakugo, who, taking advantage of his boyfriend’s arrival, retreated back into the dorm room. Kirishima was holding two drinks and, as he got closer, he looked apprehensively at Tamaki.
“I don’t have one for you, senpai,” he said, gesturing to the two cans he was holding. “I didn’t know you were coming, sorry.”
Tamaki’s brain started panicking: oh no, he hadn’t thought about whether his underclassman had the time to talk with him and now he had put him in an uncomfortable position because of a lack of drinks available. He should have texted him before coming. He had his number, why hadn’t he thought about it? Quick, he needed to find a way to put Kirishima at ease.
“It’s fine. I don’t drink.”
Kirishima frowned and, from inside the room, Bakugo tsk-ed.
“I mean. I don’t need one. I just… do you have time to talk?”
“Of course! Is it about the internship or something?” asked Kirishima, gesturing for Tamaki to come inside.
“No, it’s… uhm.”
Personal? About a crush? Suddenly he felt very stupid and what he was doing felt very pointless, so he tried to excuse himself and leave. He shouldn’t have come. It was a bad idea to involve others in his emotional turmoil.
“You’re here, you might as well make sure bothering us wasn’t useless, extra,” said Bakugo from the bed, as he checked his phone.
Tamaki froze. “Am I bothering you two?” he whispered to Kirishima.
“You’re not! We were just done with homework, actually. “ He paused. “Bakugo always helps me with it.”
Bakugo tsk-ed again and turned on his side to face the wall, but not before Tamaki could see the faintest blush on his cheeks. He suppressed a soft smile. So maybe there was a side of him that Kirishima could have fallen for.
“You can sit if you want, Amajiki-senpai,” said Kirishima, pointing at the desk, and sat on the bed, his back leaning against Bakugo’s. “What did you need to talk about?”
Tamaki shot a look at the grumpy student who had currently been promoted to human pillow. “It’s something private,” he said, meekly.
“Don’t worry, I don’t care enough about your stupid problems to bother telling anyone,” grumbled Bakugo.
“He won’t say a word, I assure you,” agreed Kirishima.
Tamaki hesitated. How could he word what he wanted to say? What did he want to ask, exactly? There wasn’t a precise question that he wanted to ask, what he wanted was a reassurance, a guide, because the two people in front of him had somehow managed to do what he was too scared to even attempt, and he wanted to know how they had looked at the friendship they already shared and decided that it was worth risking sabotaging it for the reward of what they now had.
“How do you know?” he asked. Kirishima tilted his head. “How do you know if someone likes you back?”
“Oh! I know!” excitedly started his underclassman. “Well, there are a few hints that-“
“You don’t,” interrupted him Bakugo. He pushed Kirishima away and rolled over, so that he was now facing Tamaki. “Is this about that loud blond you always hang around with?”
“His name is Togata-senpai, Kastuki! Oh, wait, is it!?”
Tamaki started to shrink under the intense gazes of the other two.
“M-maybe…”
Bakugo looked at him in silence for a while, long enough that Tamaki felt the instinct to face a wall and pretend he was alone. Was he always frowning or did his face just look like that? Then he went back to looking at his phone. Tamaki thought he was done with the conversation, but after a few moments he started talking again.
“As I said, you don’t know until you ask. Or they tell you.” He shot a glance at Kirishima. “Togata, you said? Just tell him. I’ve seen him: I would bet actual money he already thinks the sun shines out of your ass.”
Tamaki opened and closed his mouth a couple of times. First of all, was that Bakugo being supportive? And second, how could he be so sure? He didn’t even know Mirio’s name. Maybe he was just trying to make fun of him. He would have noticed if Mirio was looking at him in a different way, but there was just no chance that someone like MIrio could like someone like him. Someone so anxious, so shy, so insecure. So unlike everything Mirio was.
“What do you mean?”
“I said what I said. You are both pretty dumb if you haven’t figured anything out yet.”
That was more like Bakugo.
“Don’t be mean, Katsuki,” Kirishima scolded him. He looked at Tamaki. “I had no idea, Amajiki-senpai. But I agree with Katsuki, I don’t think you have anything to worry about!”
He underlined that statement with a thumbs up and a big grin. Tamaki stared at the finger for a little too long and sighed. Could he trust them? Or were they just trying to make him feel better?
“If you say so,” he mumbled.
“Let us know how it goes, senpai!” said Kirishima, as Tamaki left the room.
Badly. It was going to go badly. He felt it in his bones.
He wanted to go back to the dormitory. He really did. But every time he passed in front of the entrance, he couldn’t bring himself to go inside. His legs just took him on another walk through the gardens, as his mind played in loop what Bakugo had told him. Was he perceptive enough to notice how Mirio acted around him? No way. He’d just wanted him to leave. And he had figured out the fastest way to achieve that. That was all.
He was in the middle of his third walk around the building, when he heard loud footsteps approaching him from behind. It was the sound of someone running.
“Tamaki!”
He turned around and saw the determined face of Mirio coming at him at full speed, which almost gave him a heart attack. He yelped and instinctively started running too.
“Tamaki, wait!” yelled Mirio.
“Not until you slow down!”
He heard the footsteps behind him slow down the rhythm and, when he turned, Mirio had indeed settled for his normal walking pace. So he slowed down too and waited for him, heart pounding from the sudden sprint and the tension. There was no escaping his friend now.
“I saw you from the window,” explained Mirio, once he was closer. “And I wanted to join you on your walk!”
“Oh. Ok.”
Mirio smiled.
Tamaki tried to pretend that had been a walk all along and not a desperate attempt to avoid his best friend. He glanced at Mirio out of the corner of his eye: he was still smiling, looking straight ahead. His presence almost made Tamaki’s chest hurt from the strain of keeping all of his feelings inside. He wanted to tell him. He wanted so bad to tell him, but that little, horrible voice at the back of the head kept telling him that he was doing the wrong thing, that he would ruin their friendship forever, that Mirio wouldn’t have looked at him ever again, if he told him.
How did someone learn how not to listen to that voice? Was it possible to silence it forever?
He looked at the starry sky above them and took a deep breath. He couldn’t know how Mirio felt about him, unless he asked. That was true.
Maybe the secret wasn’t to silence the voice. Maybe the secret was trying to prove it wrong, by doing something no matter how scared he was.
“Mirio-“
“Did I do something?”
Tamaki froze and Mirio stopped with him. He wasn’t smiling anymore: his expression was now mostly blank, with just a hint of confusion and, perhaps, the shadow of pain.
“Uh?”
“You’re avoiding me. Is it because of that afternoon?”
Tamaki’s throat was dry. He looked helplessly into Mirio’s bright blue eyes, trying to find the strength to say yes, because I’m sure you’ve seen me smell your clothes and I can’t imagine you aren’t creeped out by that, but all the words died before they reached his mouth.
Then Mirio laughed awkwardly and scratched his neck.
“I’m sorry! I’m bad at this. I should have know better,” he said.
What are you talking about? wanted to ask Tamaki, but his throat was still in a knot. He could only watch as Mirio started fumbling with the zipper of his jacket.
“Aw, man! Being subtle is not my thing! I didn’t know if it was better to just tell you or find a way to make you understand,” he went on.
Something started dawning on Tamaki.
“Mirio…”
“I like you.”
Everything stopped. Had the forest been that quiet the entire time? Mirio liked him. He liked him. Was that why he had been particularly touchy that afternoon? He was trying to do what, flirt? And he had thought that he had upset Tamaki and that was why Tamaki had avoided him those following days. That left him speechless, but it was such a Mirio thing to do.
He was suddenly overcome by a blinding rage and he grabbed Mirio by his t-shirt, shaking him back and forth.
“How dare you tell me before I told you?! I had just found the courage to do it!”
“What?”
Tamaki bit his lip, his face suddenly very warm and probably very red. He let go of Mirio, who was just as red as him. It took the both of them a few moments process both what they’d just said and heard.
“You like me?” asked Tamaki, as if to make sure he had heard right.
“I do!” said Mirio, smiling under the spreading redness of his face.
“Why?”
It was Mirio’s turn to be rendered speechless. He blinked a couple of times, then smiled softly and reached for Tamaki’s hand. Somehow Tamaki’s heart didn’t explode at the contact.
“I can’t believe you have to ask me that,” he whispered, pulling the other boy closer. Tamaki didn’t resist and half-fell against Mirio’s chest. He could feel both of their hearts beating at a furious pace and as Mirio wrapped his arms around him, his body melted into the embrace. It was ridiculous how much he had missed the casual touching between them in those few days after the jacket accident.
He breathed in Mirio’s scent: he smelled of citrus.
“You are Suneater. You’re strong, much stronger than you believe. You want to become a hero just as much as the others, even if it doesn’t come natural to you, and it’s something about you that I admire. That’s why I can be strong too, when you’re with me. And I know that you’re funny, underneath all that anxiety. The fact that you let me see that side of you is more important to me than you can ever imagine.”
As words poured out of Mirio’s mouth, Tamaki did his best not to cry.
“And I know it’s hard for you to believe these things and believe in yourself. So I’ll repeat them to you as many times as you need to hear them.”
That was the finishing blow: no matter how hard he tried, Tamaki couldn’t stop the tears from falling down his cheeks and wetting Mirio’s t-shirt. The last shred of anxiety crumbled under the relief and joy of that moment and he finally felt like he could breathe again. He wrapped his arms around Mirio’s broad chest. His friends suddenly laughed and the sound made his entire body vibrate.
“You should know that I really want to kiss you right now, Tamaki!”
With a voice filled with confidence that he barely recognized as his own, he replied: “Do it, then.”
Tamaki had dreamt that moment, both on purpose and not, many times before. He had thought about wandering hands and soft lips, and those fantasies had always filled his stomach with butterflies and twisted it in a knot. He had expected to feel that way during the real thing too. But what he hadn’t anticipated was that strange, underlying peace, that stemmed from one reason: it was right.
Kissing Mirio was the most right thing he had ever done in his life and he couldn’t believe he had wasted all that time not kissing him. His hands clutched the fabric of his friend’s t-shirt as he deepened the kiss and Mirio let out a soft laugh at his enthusiasm.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he chuckled.
“I’m sorry for avoiding you,” said Tamaki, burying his face in the crook of Mirio’s neck. “I was afraid I’d wierded you out with that jacket thing.”
“Uh? What are you talking about?”
Tamaki frowned. “You didn’t see me? I thought you did, while I was,” he paused and blushed. “I was smelling you jacket.”
“You were doing that? I thought you were just checking to see if it was still wet!”
Tamaki looked up at Mirio, his mouth a perfect O and then couldn’t help himself: he laughed and laughed and thought, this time with a forgiveness for himself that he had never experienced, that he truly was an idiot.