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“You really wrote me love letters?” Hizashi’s voice was teasing, warm. Shouta sighed a plume of smoke up towards the sky and returned the filter between his lips.
“Is that so hard to believe?”
“That you wrote them to me? No,” Hizashi spread his fingers out for the cigarette and Shouta passed it over. “That you wrote five love letters at all? Absolutely.”
“I see my telling you has certainly not inflated that ego of yours any bigger,” Shouta snorted, giving him a look. Hizashi’s lackadaisical shrug was answer enough.
They hadn’t actually planned to end up sitting on the roof of their apartment building in the late afternoon on a Sunday, sharing a cigarette and letting the wind tangle their hair. They had planned to attend the parade that was happening in front of their apartment building, seventeen stories down. But one thing led to another and…
No, Shouta just didn’t want to go. Too many people, too much noise, just… too much. In compensation to his long-suffering extroverted boyfriend, Shouta had instead agreed to play Hizashi’s favorite game: humiliate Shouta by asking him endless questions about his crush on Hizashi throughout high school.
He’d been playing– and avoiding– this game going on five years now and somehow Hizashi still found a way to make Shouta blush and want to hide in the collar of his shirt. Every time .
“Why did you never send em?”
“Is that really a question?” Shouta gestured for the cigarette again and used it as an excuse to keep his hands and eyes busy for a moment. “Because they were stupid,” he mumbled after a while, finishing up the cigarette and extinguishing the cherry against the sole of his boot. He pocketed the butt and sighed.
“That’s for me to decide, isn’t it?” Hizashi asked, nudging their shoulders together. “They’re my letters.”
Shouta snorted but couldn’t argue the point. Instead he leaned a little closer and rested his head on Hizashi’s shoulder. Beneath their dangling feet, the parade continued, float after float passing by to the riotous chaotic noise of multiple marching bands. It was colorful, bright, vibrant, and Shouta knew he would have stood out like a sore thumb. Again. Dressed head to toe in black with an expression to match.
It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in the festivities, hell, Hizashi had asked him out at their very first pride parade, it was just that he was… tired. He was tired and he was sick of trying to make himself understood. It shouldn’t matter that some people didn’t get it, it shouldn’t matter that some people thought it was weird. He wasn’t dating some people, he was dating Hizashi, and Hizashi had no problem whatsoever dating Shouta.
Though, Shouta had to admit, they did sound like the start of a terrible joke: a proud hypersexual and a sex indifferent asexual walk into a bar…
Jesus.
But they’d made it work. They’d not only made it work, they’d been happy for the last five years. Shouta didn’t see their relationship ending any time soon, he was comfortable, he felt safe. So why was it so damn hard for him to just accept the fact that some people wouldn’t get it, and that they didn’t matter?
It’s not as though he wasn’t fucking them.
Well.
He wasn’t, but… that wasn’t the point.
“I still remember them,” Shouta said after a while, and Hizashi shifted against him. When he looked up they were eye to eye.
“Seriously?”
“I’m a perfectly normal human being,” Shouta shrugged, “I have the most humiliating experiences of my youth imprinted for eternity in my mind, couldn’t forget them if I tried.”
“Then there is no reason you can’t read them to me now.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Shouta!”
Shouta nudged his shoulder again and looked up at the sky once more. It was starting in on the golden hour; soon the sky would turn peach, blush pink, lavender. After that it would get cooler, what few stars you could see in the middle of Musutafu would twinkle to life and the parade would quiet down. And it would be the end of another day.
He glanced back to their makeshift picnic set up a little ways away, far enough from the edge of the roof that nothing could fall off it– including them– but close enough that they didn’t need to trudge all the way to their eighth-floor apartment to get a snack or a drink. Or more cigarettes. Shouta chewed his lip before pushing himself to stand on the ledge. He gave the parade another look before stepping off and onto the roof.
He could hear Hizashi scrambling to follow him, not as confident with heights as Shouta was, for obvious reasons.
“Shou, come on–”
“I can write them again for you,” Shouta said, kicking at the corners of the blanket that the wind had curled up until it was somewhat flat again before he sat down. “But only right now, up here. After this, no more talk of the dumb letters.”
“But there’s nothing to write with, you cheater,” Hizashi groaned, dropping himself to sit next to Shouta on the blanket. “Or on for that matter.”
Shouta gave him a soft look before resting back on his arms and tucking his chin down against his chest. “Take your shirt off.”
“Huh??”
“Come on,” Shouta poked him with the toe of his boot. “Not like you’re embarrassed to, even if there was someone to see.”
Hizashi narrowed his eyes at him before shaking his head, moving his hands to the hem of his shirt to peel it up and over his head.
“What are you planning, you sneaky bastard?”
Shouta didn’t answer him, because truthfully he wasn’t sure. In his mind, it was something romantic, and more often than not, his ideas about romance hit the nail on the head with Hizashi, but sometimes they flew right on by. They’d been together long enough now that they’d found more than one way to enjoy each other without Hizashi ever touching Shouta below the waist, or having Shouta touch him, and depending on Shouta’s mood that day, even those rules bent sometimes.
He didn’t want to wind Hizashi up and leave him hanging, that was the last thing he wanted. So he hoped that this was enough of a romantic little… thing. Just something. To make up for not wanting to be down at the parade, for not being the overzealous bright light people seemed to assume Hizashi would want to date instead of him.
“I plan to give you your letters,” Shouta answered, smile widening as Hizashi’s eyes narrowed further and he tossed his shirt aside. When his hands moved to his belt, Shouta gently shook his head. “Lie down.”
“Front or back?”
“Front,” Shouta tilted his head, “for now.”
“For now, huh? Tease.”
Shouta waited until Hizashi had settled, arms crossed on the blanket to rest his face on, body stretched out in comfortable recline. For several minutes, Shouta just looked at him, let his eyes roam over the familiar skin of his boyfriend. So often he’d wake up with his face pressed just there between sharp shoulder blades, blond hair tangled with his own in a way that felt more intimate than anything sexual two people could ever do.
With a sigh, Shouta moved to set both hands to Hizashi’s back, pressing the heels of his palms down as he ran them up to his shoulders and back again, stretching out the tension Hizashi always inevitably carried there. After the third deliberate kneading, he situated himself straddling Hizashi’s body, thighs spread just below the base of his spine.
All that time, Hizashi didn’t make a sound, didn’t comment, didn’t joke, and Shouta was beyond grateful. There was something to be said for sharing that kind of understanding with someone, that kind of trust to know when words were needed and when they weren’t.
Shouta leaned over him just enough to tug one of their glasses closer, still with a bit of wine in the bottom, and dipped the tip of his finger into it. When he set it to Hizashi’s skin, the other shivered.
“What are you doing?”
“Writing you a love letter,” Shouta reminded him, continuing with the characters until his finger was dry again and he had to dip it in the wine once more; as though he was actually using ink.
“Well I can’t read it if it’s there can I?”
“I said I’d write them for you again,” Shouta interrupted him, amused, “I never said I’d let you read them.”
“That’s low, Shou, even for you,” Hizashi laughed, and Shouta couldn’t resist shifting his hair to the side enough to kiss the nape of his neck.
“Tell you what,” he murmured, “I’ll write you all five, but only recite one for you. You can choose which one.”
Hizashi huffed in frustration but Shouta knew he had him hooked. After a few moments of silence, Shouta returned to writing in wine across Hizashi’s tanned skin.
The alcohol evaporated quickly, leaving nothing more than a gentle residual stickiness in its wake; nothing a quick shower at home couldn’t fix. The words lingered long enough to dry; long enough for Shouta to reach the base of Hizashi’s back before needing to start from his shoulder again.
He wrote the same words he’d written so many years ago, Kanji careful and precise, though it probably looked awful when he used his finger. He almost wished he had one of his calligraphy brushes here instead.
When he finished, he sat back and worked his hair back off his face and into an elastic. Beneath him Hizashi shifted.
“When did you write that one?”
“September, our second year.”
“You really remember that?”
“I told you,” Shouta laughed, “couldn’t forget them if I tried. Is that the one you want me to read?”
“No,”
“They get shorter,” Shouta warned him. “You know I’ve never been as good with words as you.”
“I know,” Hizashi replied, glancing up at him from over his shoulder. “Write the second one.”
So Shouta did. And then the third.
By that point, the sky above them was glowing like a lantern, and the parade below had started to wrap up. Shouta had just refilled the glass with a splash of wine to last him the next two letters when Hizashi spoke again.
“This one,” he said, “read it as you write it for me.”
Shouta cleared his throat, shifted to rest his weight on his elbow near Hizashi’s head, and set his finger to his skin.
“Zashi,” he murmured, “I know you’re not expecting poetry, but this sounds trite even to me. When I woke up from my nap today, my head was in your lap. You must’ve come into the common room and seen me there, and done it without thinking. You didn’t notice me waking up at first, you were talking to someone else, but your hand was in my hair and stroking just behind my ear and I felt so safe I wanted to cry.”
Shouta ran his knuckles up and down Hizashi’s back as though wiping the slate clean to write more. Beneath him, Hizashi didn’t make a sound, but his fingers were gripping his arms so tight they’d gone pale. Shouta swallowed and leaned back in to write.
“I hope you don’t hate me for pretending to sleep until you finally woke me up. I never wanted you to stop touching my hair like that, or holding me safe like that, where others could see. I hope I have the guts one day to touch you like that too. I hope I’m the kind of hero someday that makes you feel just as safe.”
Shouta finished the letter, and his recitation, and lay down to press himself against Hizashi’s side, one arm over his back, the other curled up beneath his head. Shouta watched with hooded eyes as Hizashi took a breath and held it, before releasing it with a cracked little hum. When Hizashi looked at him, his glasses were fogged up and his eyes behind them were shiny and bright.
“Dammit, Shou,” he whispered, before sniffing and wiping his nose with a laugh. He took his glasses off, both hands up to rub the tears from his eyes before he lay down again, reaching out to stroke Shouta’s hair just there, just where he’d described in his letter. “You’re a hopeless fucking romantic, deep down, huh?”
“Only for you,” Shouta grumbled, but he happily accepted the kiss that Hizashi pressed to the corner of his mouth, parted his lips for the one he pressed there next. “There’s one more letter left…”
“Don’t care,” Hizashi murmured, nuzzling him and tugging Shouta close so he could wrap him in his arms and tangle their legs together. “That’s the one I needed to hear.”
“Sap.”
“Yep,” Hizashi grinned, tucking some of Shouta’s hair behind his ear before pressing their foreheads together. “And you’re stuck with me now.”
“Good,” Shouta hummed, leaning into his familiar embrace that always made him feel safe. “I’m not going anywhere.”