Work Text:
Slumber Party
Abe had never really been a sleepover person. Through middle school, he'd never had that many close friends in the first place, and the ones he did have he was usually done with by the time school let out in the afternoon. Even with his Little League teammates, the closest he'd had to real friends, he'd never felt any urge to connect off the field, and if they'd put him in the rearview mirror in high school, well, that was only fair, because for his part he'd forgotten everything about them except their favorite pitches and their dominant hand. All that aside, though, he'd just never seen the attraction to bunking for a night on somebody's floor in a musty, second-hand sleeping bag and then making awkward small talk with that somebody's mom the next morning over Cheerios. But like most things in his carefully ordered routine, his social life had experienced a radical shift since coming to Nishiura—not so much because he'd changed his mind about the whole thing, but more because his new teammates could be incredibly pushy.
The first two thoughts that registered in his foggy, half-conscious mind were that Tajima's basement was freezing and somebody's sharp heel was digging into his spine. His mouth tasted like stale Cheetos and flat soda; Abe grimaced, realizing he'd forgotten to get up and brush his teeth before falling asleep in the middle of the third cheesy monster movie. The basement was a warzone now of pillows, blankets, and the comatose members of the baseball team sprawled out across every available flat surface; he had been one of the first out, and apparently the rest of the team had filled in around him—too close in one case, he thought sourly, rolling over far enough to squint at whoever had their foot in his back.
It was Hanai's foot, it turned out, but in fairness to his captain, Abe could see Tajima had made the first incursion, the incorrigible cleanup hitter's elbow jabbed like a spear into Hanai's ribs. If it wasn't four in the morning and he was in a better mood, Abe might have done Hanai the favor of kicking him awake so he could crawl to safety, but he wasn't feeling nearly that gracious. Not like there was really anywhere to go. It looked like most of his teammates had just dropped where they were—in addition to the floor contingent, Izumi, Sakaeguchi, and Mizutani, those three jokers he'd recently started thinking of as the Three Musketeers, were passed out in a pile on the small couch, and that goofball Hamada was actually stretched out under the coffee table like an enormous, shaggy dog. Abe grimaced as Hanai's ridiculously bony heel ground in between his vertebrae. There was nothing for it but to squeeze in toward whoever was sleeping on his other side and hope no limbs were flying over there.
Abe grabbed his pillow in one fist and dragged it with him as he rolled heavily to the left—then he jumped about six inches as he found himself staring into wide amber-brown eyes, his neighbor apparently not as dead to the world as he'd thought. Mihashi jumped, too, though Abe wasn't sure why—he shouldn't be surprised to find himself awake. Mihashi had his hands clenched in a thin fleece, apparently his only blanket, and he held them to his chest in the long moment of silence as Abe tried to find his tongue, a little thrown.
"Uh…sorry," he murmured finally, jerking one thumb over his shoulder. "Hanai was…just…I didn't know you were over here." He studied Mihashi's position, wedged between him and the back of the loveseat; Abe had kind of intended to bully the rest of them into letting Mihashi sleep on the short sofa so he'd be out of the fray, but considering Nishihiro had crunched himself practically in half just to fit, maybe it was better this way. He was sort of surprised Mihashi had chosen to curl up next to him, but not as surprised as he would have been six months ago—it was something the other boy been doing lately, picking the seat next to Abe's at lunch, riding next to him on the train so that their shoulders bumped on the turns. Abe kept meaning to ask, but he was finding he kind of liked it, maybe too much to risk the backslide that usually came with calling Mihashi on anything.
The pitcher was watching him with wide, wary eyes, so Abe attempted a sliver of a smile, resisting the urge to reach out and comb Mihashi's wild tangle of copper hair down with his fingers. Instead he slumped back into his blankets, resting his head against the crook of his arm, and was rewarded when Mihashi relaxed with him, dropping Abe's gaze to watch his fingers fiddle with the edge of the fleece.
"Can't sleep?"
The whisper was so quiet Abe almost didn't catch it, though he and Mihashi weren't even a foot apart. Probably not something that should have surprised him, considering the source.
"Yeah," Abe admitted, keeping his voice low, too. He shifted far enough to tuck his freezing toes into the warmth at the back of his knee, tried not to think about how cold his unzipped sleeping bag felt draped over him, how much colder Mihashi had to be under his tiny fleece. "I mean, I'm not a huge fan of the dogpile, anyway, but…I was having a weird dream. Something about that last movie." He glanced at the darkened screen, rolled his eyes at the picture in absentia. "I don't know what Tajima gets out of these ancient monster movies. Godzilla looks like a chunky armadillo."
Mihashi made a noise that was half squawk, half giggle, truncated by the hand he slapped over his mouth as his eyes flicked around the room at their sleeping teammates; no one stirred, the rest of Nishiura apparently down for the count. Abe couldn't help a little smile. There was something so genuine about Mihashi even during one of his endless little freak-outs. At last Mihashi settled down again, looking slightly guilty as he whispered through his fingers.
"Tajima says they're funny. He likes the ones…um, movies where lots of stuff happens."
"No surprise there," Abe replied, gratified when Mihashi's hand fell to rest against the curve of his pillow and he could tell he'd made his pitcher smile. He inched in just a little, wondering about the slight tug in his stomach as Mihashi mirrored him, their heads bent together like they were sharing secrets instead of inane teammate trivia. "I guess it's better than…I mean, Hanai's movies are just boring. And they're all like four hours long. What was it last time? Close Encounters of the Third Kind?"
Mihashi wrinkled his nose, and that combined with the laugh he stifled in his sleeve was—God, that was cute. Abe let that thought flicker by under the excuse of exhaustion, tried not to let it echo around his skull as he studied the shallow fall of light across his pitcher's face, the white streaks of moonlight through the half-drawn blinds. Mihashi looked different in the dark—his features were softer, more open, and there was a shy, tiny smile on his lips that Abe couldn't remember ever seeing before, in the sun. Even though he could hear the soft whistles of their teammates' breathing all around him, it felt like he and Mihashi had slipped into their own private world, a tenuous almost-space in between yesterday and tomorrow where the words were easy for once. Maybe it was because nothing felt quite real, anyway, the hush of the house a little too thick around them, Mihashi's eyes a little too bright. Maybe it was because even Mihashi wasn't afraid of him when he was whispering.
Mihashi shifted, his right hand inching toward Abe across the carpet, and automatically Abe lifted his left to meet it, tracing the familiar calluses along Mihashi's fingers with the pad of his thumb. Mihashi ducked his face into his pillow. "What, um…what kind…?" came the halting question, so muffled it took Abe a second to decipher it, and then another one to guess what he was probably asking.
"What kind of movies do I like?" Mihashi nodded, and Abe glanced up at the ceiling, realizing only now that he'd never brought anything of his own to these team movie bonanzas Tajima had been so keen on recently. "I don't know. Nothing in particular, I guess." His mother was always trying to get him to watch baseball movies, hoping for some kind of a gateway draw, but in general Abe found them unbearably predictable. He blinked through the darkness at Mihashi as something occurred to him. "You've never brought any movies either. What do you like?"
It seemed, suddenly, like a crazy important question—something he shouldn't have to ask, something he should definitely know about his partner after all this time. Even as the words left him, Abe was bracing for a long wait, the hemming and hawing he almost always got when he asked Mihashi about himself. No matter how long it took the other boy to answer, he wasn't going to lose his temper tonight—there was something too special happening between them right now, a kind of synchronicity he wasn't sure he could get back if he broke it. But whatever magic he was feeling, apparently Mihashi was feeling it too, because he only wrung the edge of the blanket a little before he opened his mouth to answer.
"I…! I like…superhero movies," he said, squeezing his hand involuntarily around Abe's, and he looked so excited that Abe couldn't help laughing under his breath, didn't bother to stop his other hand from rising to ruffle Mihashi's hair.
"Yeah, you would, huh?" he murmured, enjoying Mihashi's little squawk as he peeked out at Abe through his messy copper bangs. He could feel the heat of the other boy's body spreading out against his palm, his pulse beating just a little fast as Mihashi tilted his head up to look at him and Abe's hand fell to rest against his neck.
"Sometimes…um…sometimes just Tajima and me—and Hanai, but not always…" Abe frowned a little, confused more than annoyed, and Mihashi's hand tightened around his, his words getting faster but not much clearer. "We watch movies together, and stay over, and Tajima said…um, if I wanted…" Mihashi took a deep breath. Abe felt it trembling in his skin, his whole body bracing for whatever he was trying to say. "You could come next time," he finished in a whisper, the offer rushing out of him with his exhale, breath as much as words.
"What?" Abe asked, a little breathless himself. He wasn't really asking Mihashi to repeat himself—he was trying to ask if he had this right, that there was some kind of exclusive movie club that Tajima, grinning gatekeeper, had barred him from except as Mihashi's plus-one, and if Mihashi was really, for the first time he could ever remember, inviting him to do something together. Or maybe he was just asking himself, the part of him that had turned his nose up at sleepovers for sixteen years, if he was really that eager to spend another night in this subzero basement just because Mihashi was the one asking. But he should have remembered that vague, one-word responses were a bad way to go where Mihashi was concerned—Mihashi's hand jerked in his, and he could feel the other boy recoiling, the word soup that was his classic backpedal already stuttering out into the dark air between them.
"Not—that's…unless…not if—"
Abe tightened his grip around that precious hand, pulled it determinedly back toward him. "Sorry," he broke in, tipping his head until he could catch Mihashi's eyes as they darted around in a way that would have made him queasy. "That's my bad. I'd like that, Mihashi—thanks." Then he smiled, the smile he'd been practicing in the mirror since Sakaeguchi told him his "reassuring" expression was downright horrifying, and was more relieved than he'd want to admit when Mihashi went boneless in his hold and slowly smiled back.
The glow on his face was dimmer now; the moon had drifted behind a bank of silver clouds, and Abe could hear a breeze rattling through the bare branches outside, a soft sound like the world was whispering, too. He felt Mihashi shiver under his hand.
"Cold?" Abe asked, resisting the urge to roll his eyes when Mihashi immediately shook his head. Like I can't feel the chill on your skin. He drew his hand back from Mihashi's neck so he could lift the corner of the sleeping bag stretched over him, hold it up along the crook of his arm. "Just come here already."
Mihashi shrank back against the couch, staring into the weave of his pillow—Abe couldn't tell if he was scared about imposing or just that reluctant to get in close, tried not to care either way. Wondered for a minute if he was going to have to slide in instead, trap Mihashi against the couch just so he could keep him warm, and then feel really weird about that for the rest of the night. But finally Mihashi gave in—or just gave up, maybe—and inched across the floor a little at a time until he was just under the canopy of the sleeping bag, his anxious feet kicking against his fleece. Abe closed the last few inches himself so he could drop his arm all the way over Mihashi's waist, check with his fingers that there was no open seam where the cold could creep in. He hadn't really planned to leave his arm there, draped across Mihashi's back, his fingers sliding into the soft folds of his t-shirt—but just before he pulled back, he felt Mihashi sort of settle under his weight, like his exceptionally flighty pitcher had found something comforting in that, and suddenly he was reluctant to take it away. Maybe this was better anyway, so he'd know if the sleeping bag rode up. He refocused on Mihashi's face to find the other boy blinking at him, his gaze darting away like he wasn't sure what he was supposed to look at. Abe sighed.
"Now close your eyes," he whispered, and Mihashi did, squeezing them shut as tight as he had two weeks ago during Tajima's horror movie fest. Abe carefully refrained from shaking him. But already he was warmer, Mihashi was warmer—he could feel the glow of heat building in between them, the steady beat of Mihashi's heart fluttering like wings against his palm. Only the tips of Mihashi's fingers were cold anymore. Abe pulled his pitching hand in and pressed it to his chest. "Goodnight," he murmured, decisively, hoping that would get the point across—and then felt something in him stutter, a needle skipping on a record, as Mihashi's fingers curled into his shirt, the barest shadow of that touch prickling on his skin.
"Goodnight, Abe," Mihashi whispered back, his face relaxed at last, pale eyelashes flickering against his cheeks. Abe forced his own eyes closed so his exhausted brain wouldn't make any more observations like that. In the hazy darkness behind his eyelids, he listened to the soft huff of Mihashi's breath and wondered why it sounded so much sweeter than it had before, whether the simple act of someone breathing could be a lullaby. Then he pressed his head hard into the pillow, counted backward from a hundred to the time of the heart beating next to his.
Only on the very edge of sleep did he remember to pray he woke up before Tajima in the morning.