Work Text:
Ten seconds.
Ten eternally long, tenderly endless, horrendously short seconds.
Ten seconds that seemed enough for the world to collapse and bloom all over again around the two of them.
The burning touch on his skin; Kagiura replayed it in his mind every day for long, long minutes. His own hand seemed sometimes feverish, sometimes in need of warmth, as if facing an icy draught that was supposed to put his mind back in place. Each reminiscence intoxicated his mind, stunned his senses to come making run sparks trough his whole body. The contact became like an irrational and insatiable need. His soul drunk of these feelings impossible to choke, consuming him at least as much as they exalted him, the basketball player came to think that he could never be satisfied with only ten small seconds anymore.
It had nothing to do with simply saying he wanted to marry him to spend time with him. He still wanted him for himself alone, but the emotions that were imploding inside him kept spilling over far beyond this naivety.
So, with all this... It was hard for Kagiura to stay focused on his studying. Especially when he heard his roommate, a meter behind him, mumbling about his own, and his mind was more focused on the erasures he heard him make than on his English homework.
“Hirano-san!” he exclaimed, turning to face him.
Hirano also turned hearing his name, diving his eyes as blue as a summer sky in his, a surprised pout stretching his face.
Kagiura tightened the grip of his left hand on the pencil he had not let go. “Can we take a ten-second break?” he asked in an undertone that only them could understand.
In front of him, Hirano's face, although so harmonious, tightened almost imperceptibly. For a second, Kagiura thought that it was only an effect that the glaring rays of the fading sun were bringing to their room... Before realizing that it wasn't. His brown eyebrows, in contrast to his bleached hair, were furrowed, expressing some discomfort. He could see his jaw clenching through the curve in his cheeks. A twinge of anxiety crept into his stomach.
“Hirano-san?”
“Can we talk, Kagi-kun?”
The hesitant yet determined voice that vibrated in his eardrums sent a shiver of apprehension through the younger of the two students. No matter what he might have to say, Kagiura had a bad feeling... But he nodded his head in agreement.
“You wanted me to... give you a chance," Hirano began, scratching the back of his neck in embarrassment. “It's been a few weeks now, and... In the end, I think there’s really no way for us to be together.”
It seemed to him that a "that's embarrassing saying things like that out loud" reached the basketball player, yet he did not distinguish anything more. The ground seemed to give way under his feet. His pencil slipped through his fingers to fall to the bedroom floor in a meaningless echo, but he couldn't keep his dark eyes off his roommate's strained face. Time seemed to freeze around him, around them; where ten seconds always felt too short with Hirano, they lasted an eternity at that moment.
“I asked to change room," the older said when he saw his silence.
Change room?
“You...”
Hirano's face, a meter away from his, blurred in his field of sight. How many months had it been now since he had confessed his feelings, and that they had both – especially him – given their best to be able to continue sharing this dorm room? All those efforts couldn't be reduced to dust so easily.
“Hey, Kagi-kun.”
“Why didn't you... tell me about this before you asked to change rooms?”
“It just happened, that's all.”
Frustration and disappointment snaked through his veins, as toxic as poison, and yet the feeling that he could no longer clearly distinguish these emotions from all others assailed him. It was as if he wasn't sure he really felt them anymore, unsure if they were really his.
“I worked hard to be able to continue sharing this room with you, you know that...”
Everything seemed to blend together, to blur around him. Anger overflowed from the already agitated stream of his feelings, yet no sound passed the wall of his lips as he tried to speak again.
“Kagi-kun, wake up.”
And Hirano's face vanished completely.
The least one could say was that Hirano was a heavy sleeper. He was not ready to forget that time when, half asleep after getting up in the night, he foolishly went back to sleep in the wrong bed, sharing it with Kagiura, and the latter never managed to wake him up. It was on the morning, when the face of his roommate had appeared first next to him, the eyes hemmed with rings, that he had realized it.
So... The mere fact that his eyelids opened naturally at three forty-seven in the morning was almost a miracle. However, in a way, he thanked his unconscious which had pulled him out from Morpheus, because otherwise he would not have heard the plaintive moans of his roommate at the other end of the room. At first surprised, he had called him with a voice to soft not to be still asleep. Facing the lack of answer, the third year had straightened up, taken his telephone to use its light, before leaving the embrace of its sheets.
“Kagi-kun, are you okay?”
The light from his phone screen flooded his roommate's face, which immediately tensed up. With his eyes still closed, Kagiura grabbed his blanket with his hands and pulled it back to him, but he didn't seem to wake up.
A nightmare?
In the last few days, he couldn't really tell if his kôhai had seemed disturbed by something or not. He himself had been too focus in his studying at the beginning of his last year of high school to realize anything. But now that he thought about it, he could see him frowning in his memories, but also – and in total opposition to these reminiscences – wearing this wide smile when they spent time together, in the evening. When they allowed themselves those ten daily seconds of closeness, touching, wrapped up in the cocoon of their boarding dorm room. This secret of them and them only, in which he had found himself despite himself.
A few weeks later, things were now confused, in his mind. The only thing he was sure of was that these moments were now part of their routine.
“Hey, Kagi-kun," he breathed softly, before sitting on the edge of his roommate's bed.
The grip exerted by Kagiura on this poor blanket decreased. Noticing it, it was on his hand that the Hirano's gaze stopped. These fingers that he now knew by heart, for having seen them on his own countless times, up to the small scar on his little finger, caused by a fall in his childhood as he had already explained it once. Watching it suddenly seemed so natural and habitual that he unconsciously grabbed it.
Against all expectations, while he was reveling his heat without even realizing it, the hand of the basketball player tightened fully around his, embracing him so strongly that it became almost painful. The eyebrows frowned, but the eyelids still closed, Kagiura let escape a plaintive lamentation, almost sorrowful. Even though only the screen of his phone on the bed was enlightening them, Hirano could easily imagine the features of his face. He frowned, unsatisfied in finding himself powerless, before letting the fingers of his free hand slide to the cheekbone of his kohai. The sketch of a thin smile stretched his lips, whereas his index finger brushed gently Kagiura's cheek.
"Kagi-kun, wake up."
But he didn't move att all.
After all, waking him up every morning for more than a year was hella complicated...
Since the gentle method wasn't working, Hirano pinched his nose, in a feeling halfway between amusement and worry. And the reaction was almost immediate: after only a few short seconds, the eyelids of the basketball player opened abruptly, before he immediately straightened up in a sitting position, short of breath. Hirano almost froze, surprised by this quick move. Their fingers still linked, Kagiura wiped with the back of his free hand his temples, surely to wipe off the sweat that the half-light didn't allow to distinguish.
"Hirano-san?" he asked. "Is that... my bed?"
A slight laugh escaped Hirano. Despite the liveliness of his gestures, his voice showed that he was not fully awake. The simple fact that he was not paying any attention to their holding hands confirmed it.
"Of course it's your bed. You got me worried, you looked like you were having a nightmare."
The eyelids of the basketball player closed gradually, sign of his struggle not to fall asleep again right now; something that Hirano could in fact see every morning. He was about to let a laugh escape him, when he felt the second year's hand let go of his. His features turned into an incredulous pout, but he didn't have time to question himself. To his surprise, as he expected Kagiura to simply fall backwards into his sheets, he felt his arms come around his neck in an embrace that sent a shiver down his spine. And before he even realized what was happening, he was pulled forward by the reclining basketball player.
His phone, until now resting on the edge of the bed, bounced when their two bodies slumped like this, before falling to the ground, now only lighting the ceiling.
Thus, lying half on Kagiura, only separated from him by the blanket which went up to their stomach, he remained at first motionless. The feet always put on the floor, his two hands on the blanket, and wrapped in an embrace for the least surprising, he found himself calmly waiting.
"Kagi-kun?" he finally asked, not knowing how to react.
"I... I dreamed that you asked to change rooms."
His pupils narrowed despite the darkness, as his roommate's voice came to him in a whisper against his ear. He suppressed a shiver.
"Why would I do such a thing?"
"You... did it because you didn't love me back."
With half-opened lips, Hirano found himself unable to deny it as he had done it so many times before. The words hung in the air, unable to be put together in a sentence. If Kagiura had been in such pain in his sleep, was it his fault?
Why did the mere idea of hurting him by letting him think he didn't love him back suddenly seem so painful?
In a reflex of his body much more than of his spirit, he let his left hand come to rest on Kagiura's hair, in what seemed to be comfort. The contact of his hair seemed softer than usual, so much so that he was surprised to close his eyes.
"It was all in your dream. Go back to sleep, now."
"Yes..."
His voice was only a whisper, which made Hirano feel as if it was running over his skin for a long time. The embrace in which he had been put did not weaken for as much, so he stayed enjoying the calming peace which settled on the room, and let his hand run through Kagiura's hair. For the first time, he discovered himself avid of this contact; of the heat which he felt against his chest, and which propagated trough the entirety of his body. Greedy of this proximity which bound them and on which he had no more power. Eager for the feeling of Kagiura's heartbeat against his skin, with a slowness that indicated that he had already fallen back asleep.
Perhaps his face seemed warmer. Almost ignited. It was far from being unpleasant though.
He would never be able to fall back asleep in such a position. But he could at least enjoy it. Because in the end, it was much better than ten short seconds.