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You like Shouto because his quiet matches yours.
They’re not entirely the same. No two quiets exactly alike, as different as the people they belong to, who create them. But they’re close enough.
His is a more content silence, an ability to sit with his own thoughts and opinions, to wait until the motivation to say something—even something inane about a cat he saw three days ago or the most out-of-touch take you’ve ever heard in your life—becomes powerful enough to make putting the words out into the world worth it.
Yours is more apathetic, tired. A lack of energy written into the very core of you. You know this about yourself, are aware of your own shortcomings. Well versed in the way that you occasionally make people uncomfortable in social situations.
But you don’t think he minds much, if at all. You even make him laugh sometimes, when you do lean over to mutter something to him, the dry raspy chuckle of his voice reminding you of flames crackling, the burning wood of a bonfire collapsing in on itself.
He makes you laugh sometimes too. Probably not on purpose, but he looks pleased each time it happens. Like he’s won something he had no idea he was even competing for.
Different, but similar, your quiets.
Which means you end up next to each other a lot.
The unsociable folks leftover at the party, you and him and Shoji and sometimes Tokoyami, if he shows up. Your quiets blend, melt together. Become easily understood languages, where looks mean things and shifts in shoulders mean other things. It’s easy, makes existing in social groups in public more relaxing. Less of a chore and more of a space to rest.
He sits next to you at these get-togethers now, just like he used to in high school. The two of you back then, bookending opposite sides of the couch in the quiet together. Months after the war, when nothing fit back together how it was supposed to, quiet in the makeshift common room at night after everyone else hauled themselves to bed. Shoulders touching on the threadbare couch.
Silent and close at forced movie nights when the dust finally settled and people felt like they could smile and laugh and joke again.
Your quiets have practice existing together, is what you mean. You might not talk about much, but you can hold a mean conversation with incremental shifts of your eyebrows and partial facial expressions.
You like him, you think. In a sort of nebulous, hard to grasp kind of way. Where maybe it doesn’t mean anything, but maybe it means absolutely everything. It’s hard to tell with you. With him.
It’s late after the most recent Yuuei graduate outing, another bar crawl that Denki conned you into with his puppy dog eyes and vaguely guilting statements. As if you wouldn’t come on your own.
Far too late for you both to still be in public, but Shouto doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, so neither do you.
Even if you’d prefer to be on a couch with him somewhere instead, here you stay.
You’re both crouched on the curb outside of the izakaya, the laughter of your friends, the people you have—perhaps against your better judgment—made your family, echoes out into the street as the door opens and dissolves, casting a happy tinge over everything.
Shouto is a warm presence next to you, favoring you with his blessed left side. He’s quiet, but that’s nothing new. The sound of his breathing has become a familiar soundtrack to your life, the soft sweep of his inhales, the longer rush of his exhales. You like him beside you.
You hope he knows.
He makes no indication to do or say anything, gazing down the length of the street at where it becomes a vantage-point-converging neon tinged blur in the dark.
You’re watching him.
You can’t really help it. Spending so much time together sitting around and not really doing anything gives you ample time to look at him, yet another of your favorite pastimes.
He’s just as beautiful in the dark as he is in the daylight, but something about the hush the darkness casts over him makes him easier to look at. Makes it feel less like something obvious, something pointed.
“Alright?” he asks when he catches you watching, the low timber of his voice almost blending into the din of the street, almost hidden by the wave of laughter that your friends—your loved ones, the people you’ve both chosen over and over again—send crashing out into the street.
You hear it anyway.
You appreciate the question, the one word check-in that folds multiple different possibilities into it. He knows how it feels to be overwhelmed by the lights and the sounds and the conversations, even with the people you both love. Knows that sometime sitting on the street outside for a few minutes is the only cure.
You think that if you said you wanted to leave, he would come with you. That he’d follow behind you to the conbini a few blocks away or maybe even to your living room, where he would curl up small on the couch like a cat as if he isn’t as tall as you are.
“Alright,” you confirm, but you don’t close your mouth quickly enough, more words tumbling out after your answer. “Here with you, aren’t I?”
His ridiculous eyes widen, the pink neon from the bar sign across the street making the grey one look a dark mauve color. You want to touch his face, want to drag your fingers over the scar that he no longer makes a point to hide.
You want to be quiet with him, together in your apartment. His, if he’d prefer that. You want to wake up next to him and take careful note of the first words he says. Press them into your mind. Note them down beside the last words he says at night. You want to see if perhaps, maybe, you could make him loud. Comfortable and secure in your sheets, him under you, the half-thought daydreams you’ve been trying not to indulge in over the last few months flicker through your mind like they’re on a film reel.
You blink the thoughts away and focus your attention back on him.
Startlingly enough, he’s smiling. A tiny curve across his beautiful mouth, a pleased sort of confirmation on his face. Saying something without saying anything at all.
“Yes,” he says, eyes twinkling in the dark. Sure of himself now more than ever, with the tiny piece of yourself you let him have without thinking. “With you.”
He reaches out to grab your hand and it feels like the start of something.