Work Text:
Hizashi’s alarm wakes him up.
He gets it turned off on the first try and lies there in the dark after, blurry eyes blinking up at the ceiling. It’s dark out still. The space on the bed beside him is cold and empty. It’s eleven pm and Shouta is still out patrolling. Hizashi takes a minute to listen to the hum of the house, the sprinkle of rain outside his window. He has about five left before he needs to get up and ready to head to the radio station.
It’s not that he didn’t sleep well. It’s just that he dreamed he was grading English papers, something he’s been doing all week long, which kind of makes him feel like he hasn’t slept at all. It’s Friday now, or it will be in about an hour, and it takes him at least that long to do his hair. Hizashi needs to be at the station by quarter to one.
He counts to three and springs out of bed.
The bathroom light seems unnaturally bright at this hour, but Hizashi is generally accustomed to starting his day when the rest of Japan are ending theirs. He shuffles to the sink to brush his teeth and stares at himself in the mirror, squeezing toothpaste onto his brush. He’s wearing his casual glasses – the bulky red ones that he’s dubbed his ugly glasses – and they do nothing to hide the heavy bags under his eyes. It’s nothing that his costume sunglasses won’t fix.
A glob of toothpaste drips from his brush and smudges down the sink bowl. It agitates him and he doesn’t know why.
Tuna is fast asleep on the couch when he crosses through the living room on his way out. He switches out his glasses and watches her stretch her little white paws out, claws puncturing the couch cushions. She is going to be absolutely smothered by Shouta’s affection when he gets in from his patrol, and Hizashi is unbelievably jealous as he shuts and locks the front door behind him.
This might be the first Friday he’s ever not wanted to go to the station.
It’s not that he’s dreading it or anything – Hizashi looks forward to his Friday morning show every week without fail. It’s just that he’s been having a hell of a week. Everything has been non-stop.
Put Your Hands Up Radio is hosting a charity event for kids whose quirks manifesting have caused them physical damage. Being deafened by his own quirk, this is something that Hizashi cares about deeply and he wants to be as involved as he can be. The event itself is next Friday, and he’s sunk a lot of hours into making sure it was properly organised and promoted. He’s happy to do it, it’s just been a lot of work.
Exam season is coming fast at Yuuei, and as the Head of the English department, Hizashi’s been overseeing the other teacher’s lesson plans and grading practice exams. He wants to make sure the students get their results back quick-smart!! so they know what they have to work on. It’s taken the better part of this week, but he’s all but finished with them now.
Surprisingly, his patrols have been the least eventful out of his three jobs. Apart from a small-time villain causing a little public disturbance on Wednesday, not much has happened on the hero front.
All in all, Hizashi’s had a busy week. His schedule is clear for this evening, and the thought of spending the whole night wrapped under his honey’s arm is what’s going to get him through this last day.
Hizashi gets to the station with twenty minutes to spare and one of his interns – an excitable girl named Mari – immediately rushes over to greet him. She’s a fast talker, it’s her quirk, and she matches Hizashi’s energy easily. He thinks she’s got a bright future in radio, but all he’s thinking of right now is the fact that he can see her lips moving but can’t hear the sound that’s coming out.
…He’s forgotten his hearing aids. Great. Of all the ways to start off his day.
It’s fine. He doesn’t need them. Mari talks fast, but he’s an adept lip reader. Due to the nature of his quirk, he’s also a pro at regulating his own volume. His studio has lights that tell him when he’s on air, and he’s combed over tonight’s setlist enough times that he knows exactly what order which songs will play and when he’s supposed to talk about what. It’s only four hours.
The four hours drag into each other.
It goes okay, all things considered. Hizashi is aware that there was one moment where his volume teetered on the edge of too loud, and he had looked up in time to catch Mari’s slight wince across from him and quickly got it back under control. He doesn’t think he left himself enough time this morning to do his hair because he keeps feeling strands of it tickle at the back of his neck. Every time it grazes his skin it sends a spike of frustration through him until he feels like a shaken up bottle of soda. It’s fine. It’s only four hours.
He leaves the station feeling stressed, but relieved that it’s over with, and is extra conscious of his lack of hearing on the drive over to Yuuei.
It’s early enough that he beats the morning traffic.
He’s one of the first in the teacher’s lounge, which isn’t unusual on a Friday. Thirteen and Cementoss are here already, and Hizashi knows the general order of who will follow and that Shouta will be the last to arrive.
His husband is a nuisance at waking himself up without that extra nudge. Hizashi pouts. It wouldn’t usually be a problem, but Hizashi is feeling extra sensitive today. Shouta has a way of making him feel at ease without even doing anything, and that’s what Hizashi wants right now.
He heads to his desk and sits down, then pouts harder when there’s nowhere for him to rest his elbows. He hadn’t realised how much junk had accumulated here over the last week, and it’s as he’s sweeping pencils and clutter into the top drawer that he sees it and remembers.
Hizashi keeps post it notes stuck to the screen behind his computer. They remind him of his odd jobs, of when each of them are due. They stare at him now, obnoxiously pink.
FINISH 2-B’S PAPERS BY MONDAY!!
He wants to bang his head against his desk.
How could he have forgotten this? His subconscious even reminded him! He wants to crawl under the table and not move until school lets out, but that is not the outlook to have before the day has even started.
A hand touches his back and startles him bad enough that he almost screams.
Almost, because he’s a professional and he’s inside of a school. Hizashi spins around to see Vlad King stood behind him with his hands up placatingly. He’s frowning, but Vlad King always has a permanent scowl on his face, and it’s one that could rival Shouta’s.
“Good morning, Mic.”
“Vlad!” Hizashi shoots finger guns at him. “Sorry, man.” He points at his ear. “I didn’t hear ya coming.”
Understanding dawns on Vlad King’s gruff face and he goes to walk away. “I can ask you later-“
“Nah, it’s fine.” Hizashi waves him off. “Ask away, yo.”
“Okay. The English papers?” Hizashi inwardly curses. He should have let him go, but he’s a people pleaser at heart. “Do you think you’ll have them finished by Monday? 2-B keep asking me when they can expect them back-”
Hizashi should have known that was what Vlad King wanted. He was 2-B’s homeroom teacher, after all.
“Yeah man, sure thing.” Vlad King nods, appeased, and Hizashi tacks on a “don’t sweat it!” in English that is every bit as false as it sounds enthusiastic. He very much intends to sweat it himself, and he won’t stop until he’s got those papers graded.
Nemuri comes in next and makes fun of him when she sees his predicament. Hizashi laughs along with her, glad to get some humour out of the situation, and there’s twenty minutes left until homeroom when his hearing aids are dropped onto the desk in front of him.
Hizashi scoops them up and whirls around, hurrying to slot them into place in his ears. “Eraser!” he greets, lit up just by watching Shouta shuffle sleepily over to his own desk. “What would I do without you?”
“Wither and die,” Shouta states, and Hizashi laughs loud enough that Shouta tells him to quiet down. He’s only been in the room with him for five seconds and already Hizashi feels livelier.
Shouta has nothing else to say this morning it seems, because once he slumps into his desk chair he doesn’t move again until the bell rings. Hizashi doesn’t care. He hasn’t seen Shouta since they left the school yesterday; he had a patrol straight after and by the time he got home, Shouta had left for his own. Hizashi is happy to sit in his husband’s company until it’s time for lesson one.
They both have back-to-back classes all day, but it doesn’t matter. Shouta stands up, stretches, and runs a hand discreetly over Hizashi’s shoulders as he heads out. Hizashi is swooning. He cannot wait to take full advantage of his quiet evening.
That is, until lunchtime, when Nemuri waltzes into the teachers lounge.
“I bet Tuna can’t wait to see her Auntie Nem,” Nemuri remarks, flicking through pictures on her phone of Sushi, her own cat. Shouta passes and places a cup of coffee down in front of Hizashi, then sits next to Nemuri to look at the photos over her shoulder, slurping his jelly pouch.
He doesn’t react at all at Nemuri’s intentions of coming over tonight.
“Naming her Tuna was a homage to Sushi, I don’t care what either of you say.”
Hizashi laughs along, though he’s slowly dying inside. “Huh?”
Nemuri squints at him like she’s figuring out if he’s joking or not. When she realises that he’s not, she holds her hand over her heart, the cuff on her wrist clinking as she gasps dramatically, mock offended. “I can’t believe you forgot! This is a slight on our friendship.”
“What? I didn’t forget! No way, man.” He did forget. His memory has been all over the place recently. They had planned a games night almost two weeks ago as a way for the lot of them to catch up. Hizashi and Shouta are hosting because they all know it’s the only way to make sure that Shouta will actually be there. Tensei is coming too, and they haven’t seen him properly for months. Hizashi had been excited to ask him how his little brother Tenya is doing.
Hiazshi would admit it if he didn’t fear the wrath of Midnight’s whip as punishment for forgetting. Games night was partly his idea. He can’t believe he forgot.
It’s fine. He’s got two more classes until the end of the day, and the last one is 2-B. The first one goes quickly, and no sooner has he walked into 2-B’s classroom is he being attacked with a barrage of questions concerning the outcomes of their practice exams.
“Okay listeners, settle down!” Hizashi chuckles, and the class reluctantly fall back into their seating plan. “I know you’re all eager to see how well you did in your favourite subject – it’s great to see; Plus Ultra! I’m sure Vlad King’s told ya already, but I’m gonna need ‘til Monday before I can get them all back to you, ya dig? We got a lesson first thing, and we’ll be going over all the points where the majority of you struggled. Sound good?”
He gets a few grumbled affirmations which is all he needs. He’s marked half of this class’s papers already, and he’s got ten more to go. It shouldn’t be a problem.
They’re covering prepositions today, words like on, in, at, of, and how they’re used to show places, locations, time, directions, and more. He’s getting a lot of vacant faces as the lesson wears on, enough that Hizashi seriously considers stopping and just giving them a study period. It’s not the student’s faults that they are not getting it, and Hizashi wants to bang his head against the chalkboard and call it a day already.
He’s the problem. He knows that goes without saying. They were ten minutes in when he first lost his train of thought, and when he turned to look at the rest of the class, they were looking back at him so blankly that he wondered if he was even speaking Japanese. He catches himself rambling fifteen minutes later and is quick to steer himself back onto topic, and he’s a little harsher than usual when he catches two students talking among themselves at the back of the classroom.
He is not a strict teacher, and the two of them seem taken aback by his response. His chest feels heavy with guilt when they leave at the end of the day and don’t say goodbye with the same energy as usual.
He drops his head against the desk and groans when the classroom is empty, taking a minute before he packs up his things. He’s a bad teacher. He’s not – not really – but he feels like he is.
Shouta would tell him to be logical, reassure him that he’s just having an off day. He’s so thankful that the work portion of it is finally over.
They meet by the car and Nemuri waves at them as she slides into her own. She’s going home first to change out of her Midnight gear, and both she and Tensei will arrive together later.
Hizashi is quiet the whole way home, but his mind doesn’t stop.
“Do you wanna shower first, or should I?”
Shouta shrugs in the doorway as he kicks his boots off, more interested in how Tuna is meowing around his legs. Hizashi hangs his leather jacket by the door, then his speaker, relieved as the weight of it is lifted off his shoulders. He just wants to collapse in his bed and not move for the rest of the weekend. Instead he kneels to unlace his boots and leaves Shouta in the hallway, heading for the bathroom. It makes sense for him to go first. He takes the longest in the shower, and he can spend the time that Shouta’s in there to set up their apartment before Nemuri and Tensei arrive.
He flicks the light on in the bathroom, and despite it not being dark out, it’s as painfully bright as it was this morning. Hizashi squints while he undresses. Weird.
He’s lathering his hair with shampoo and rerunning the events of the day through his head. He thinks he remembered to do everything – he still has those papers to finish grading, but that’s fine. He can work on those more tomorrow. His show went smoother than he thought it would, and he doesn’t think it was too obvious that he couldn’t hear a thing the whole time. Hot water rinses the gel out of his hair and he blinks away the dark spots that suddenly swim into his vision. He needs to hold his hands out to steady himself against the shower wall. Weird.
Shouta’s half asleep on the couch when Hizashi emerges, his capture weapon still wound around his neck. The cat is curled up on his lap, and Shouta’s hand is stilled on top of her. Hizashi snickers and walks up behind them. He dried his hair in the bathroom before he came out and it brushes over Shouta’s face as he leans over him, smirking.
Shouta’s nose twitches and he bats the hair away as if annoyed by it. Hizashi snickers a little louder.
“Done?”
“Shower’s all yours,” he confirms, and Shouta hoists himself up with a murmured apology at disturbing Tuna. “What time did Nem say they’d be here?”
“I’d give them another hour.” Shouta yawns. Hizashi watches and thinks same. “Can’t we cancel and go to bed?”
“No.” But he’s thinking, you have no idea how appealing that sounds. “We haven’t hung out with Tensei in ages, and Nem was looking forward to it. I don’t think she’d let us cancel if we tried.”
“True.” Shouta sounds annoyed, but he looks fond for a moment before it’s replaced by concern. “Are you okay?”
Hizashi guffaws and blinks at him stupidly. “What?”
“Are you okay?”
“…I’m fine?” Hizashi looks down at himself, then back up at Shouta. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“You look pale.”
That makes him laugh, and it’s only then that Shouta seems to believe him. “Speak for yourself.”
Shouta eyes him for a moment longer. “Okay. Yeah,” he says, and then disappears towards the bathroom. Hizashi hears the shower start a minute later.
Nemuri will probably want to play some drinking game that will get them all wasted, and that sounds equally as draining as it does fun tonight. Hizashi tidies what little mess has been left out – a few of Tuna’s cat toys that he sweeps back over to her bed, and he does a sweep of the apartment in general just to be safe – but there’s nothing much to do until Nemuri and Tensei arrive. Maybe he could finish those papers now? It would give him a head start that he could use tomorrow. Or he could start drawing up his lesson plans for next week, not to mention the charity event was coming up fast and there were a few more things he wanted to go over before then…
The dark spots come back.
Hizashi blinks hard a few times, but his vision doesn’t clear. His thoughts are clouded, swirling into nothing, and he has half a mind to call out for Shouta before he loses his balance and goes careening towards the floor.
He blinks awake to a hand lightly slapping his cheek.
Shouta’s hovering over him, his brows knit with worry. Hizashi stares at him until Shouta realises he’s awake and the slaps stop. His wedding ring, on a chain around his neck, swings inches over Hizashi’s face. Now that they’re just looking at each other, it’s actually kind of nice.
“Hey baby.”
“Thank fuck.” Shouta’s frown drops and he leans back on his heels, relieved. His hair is dripping wet and he’s wearing nothing but a towel around his waist. “I was one second away from calling an ambulance.”
Hizashi peers around himself a little, his head pillowed by one of the couch cushions. The coffee table is higher up than he is.
“Why are we on the floor?”
Shouta’s face twists into another scowl.
“You fainted.”
Oh.
Hizashi moves his arms to push himself up, but Shouta stops him with a hand on his chest, keeping him on the floor.
“Don’t get up,” he says, like Hizashi is the mad one for even attempting it.
“Nem and Tensei,” Hizashi argues, and Shouta shakes his head, watering them both with droplets from his long hair.
“I told them not to come.”
“Sho-“
“Are you serious? You’re on the floor right now, Hizashi.” His face softens. Shouta pulls his hand back, trusting Hizashi to stay where he is, and Hizashi doesn’t move. “Are you okay? If you tell me that you’re fine one more time I swear to God-”
He does feel fine though. In fact, he feels better than he’s felt all day. His head is still swimming, but it doesn’t give him the same dizzying sensation that poured over him before. It’s more like an after effect of what’s already happened.
“I didn’t mean to faint.”
“Of course you didn’t.” Gentle fingers brush through Hizashi’s hair and get caught in the knots halfway down. Shouta frees his hand and smooths it back down. “Trust you to work until you literally drop.”
Shouta doesn’t look angry anymore, and Hizashi doesn’t believe that he was really angry with him anyway. He does know exactly what Shouta’s going to say to him.
“Maybe I’m doing too much?”
Shouta scoffs. Hizashi can’t take him too seriously in just the towel and he’s grateful for that much. This conversation would be a lot harder to have otherwise.
“Understatement.” Shouta stands up, his hand hiking the towel back up so it doesn’t fall around his ankles. Hizashi is not too out of it to appreciate how delicious Shouta looks in front of him, but he turns to leave.
“Where are you going?”
Shouta points at him, fixing him in place. “Stay where you are,” he says, like he’s talking to one of his students, and he slinks off towards the kitchen.
Hizashi sighs and regards the ceiling, reminiscent of how he did when his alarm woke him up this morning. His legs feel funny, weightless, and he sees that Shouta has stacked a pile of cushions from the couch and rested his legs on top of them. He chuckles when he sees them. The decorative cushions had been his idea when they moved in together.
Shouta returns with a glass of water and helps him sit up, though Hizashi is confident he can do it himself. He’ll let Shouta have this though, knows it will make him feel better to help him. If their roles were reversed, Hizashi wouldn’t rest until he had personally tucked Shouta into bed himself.
“Did you catch me?” Hizashi smiles. Shouta’s face takes on a slightly red hue, which Hizashi finds adorable. He knows he fell but nothing aches, and he doesn’t think he hit the floor unless he’s been extremely lucky.
Shouta gestures to the towel. “You fell as I was coming out the bathroom.”
Hizashi cups his blushing cheek. “My hero.”
“Shut up,” he pushes the glass into Hizashi’s hand, “drink your water.”
Hizashi does. They stand up slow and Shouta keeps an arm around him as they wobble carefully to the bedroom. Shouta shucks off the towel and puts on his pink sweatpants once Hizashi’s comfortably on his side of the bed, and he lays alongside him as soon as he’s dressed. It’s exactly what he was missing this morning.
“You’re not off the hook yet,” Shouta murmurs into the bedspread.
“Aw, do we have to talk about it?”
“You scared me.” It’s stern as he says it, and Hizashi feels guilt settle back into his chest like a cement block. “I was seriously about to call an ambulance. Or Recovery Girl. I don’t think she would appreciate being called out for something that could easily have been avoided.”
There’s no point in trying to argue with him. As irrational as Shouta can sometimes act in stressful situations, he applies logic to every argument that he makes.
“You’re right. I let everything kind of pile up, yeah? I’m not normally so disorganised.”
“You’re not disorganised. You’re taking on too much.”
“Pfft, me? Why would I do that?”
Shouta gives him a look, unamused, and Hizashi sinks back into the comfort of their shared bed. Right. He’s a people pleaser.
“Take a day off tomorrow.”
“Can’t.” It’s the same argument as it always is. “I got stuff to do.”
“Rationalise it. Is it the English papers? Finish them on Sunday.”
…He could do that.
“What else?”
“I gotta call the station. We haven’t finished setting up for the charity event and I have to make sure that-“
“That’s not until Friday. You’ve got all week to do that, and the same can be said for anything. If you don’t finish the papers by Monday, the students will get them on Tuesday.”
And put like that, nothing that he has to do really seems as pressing as it did before.
“I can do that.”
“Good.” Shouta holds his hand out, flat and expectant. “Give me your ugly glasses and go to sleep.”
Hizashi smirks as he pulls his glasses off his face and hands them over, and Shouta folds them carefully and leans back to deposit them on his bedside table. Hizashi knows it’s so he can’t reach them and go back to doing whatever task after Shouta falls asleep. He’s grateful for it, how easily Shouta always manages to guide him back when he hasn’t realised that things are becoming too much.
It’s not even dark out, but neither of them have anywhere to be in the morning. Now that Hizashi’s got a free day, they can spend it lazily lounging together until Shouta leaves for his patrol in the evening. Shouta might be asleep already, his breaths deeper. Hizashi feels smug as he throws an arm over him. He’ll send Nemuri and Tensei a message tomorrow, and although they obviously have to reschedule, he doesn’t feel bad about it.
He got exactly what he wanted.