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Mao almost doesn’t realize it, at first.
The worst part is that they always start slowly. Just a tightness in his chest, not nearly enough to make him pay attention; a breath that comes a bit too quickly, a bit too short; a shiver that he can easily reason away as just a passing draft. Everything feels fine and normal and like something Mao can deal with, until it doesn’t.
Trickstar’s schedules had finally aligned to let them do a full-unit practice (the first one in god knows how long; if Mao hadn’t been nearly overwhelmed to this point with student council work he would certainly have felt more guilty about his inability to make time for his unit), and they’re about halfway through today’s session. Subaru and Makoto had left to go find snacks for everyone, leaving Hokuto and Mao alone in the practice room to catch their breath, sweat dripping down their temples from the intense dance practice they had just subjected themselves to in order to make up for lost time.
Mao stoops to pick up his water bottle, trying and failing to catch his breath. His lungs feel two sizes too small — never quite expanding enough to get Mao the oxygen he needs on the inhale, catching and shaking on the exhale. His fingers wrap around the cap of the water bottle, and it twists off — but not before taking more effort than it should. Mao frowns. Odd…
Mao lifts the bottle to his lips, and his hand tremors briefly, quickly, quick enough that Mao would think he imagined it if not for the way the water spills over the lip of the bottle and sloshes down Mao’s chin, soaking the collar of his practice shirt.
He frowns again. His breath catches in his throat on his next inhale, and the tightness in Mao’s chest that he had assumed was just his lungs burning with exhaustion from practice squeezes, so hard it hurts, so hard his inhale stutters again. His fingers grip the water bottle tighter, almost unconsciously.
Oh .
“Hokuto,” Mao manages to get out — manages to scrape past the thorns lining his throat and the thick chains wrapping around his chest. Trickstar’s leader is across the room, and his eyes — so blue, so intense, begging to get lost in — snap to meet Mao’s, brows furrowing lightly in confusion.
“What is it, Mao?” Hokuto asks, and Mao grips his water bottle tightly enough that he’s suddenly very, very glad that it’s made of a hard enough plastic that it won't bend beneath his fingers.
“Panic attack,” Mao forces out between a shuddering exhale, and Hokuto’s eyes widen almost imperceptibly in understanding, his water bottle forgotten as he strides quickly across the room towards Mao.
It’s something Mao still has yet to get used to, even this many months into his relationship with the rest of Trickstar. How suddenly, something he used to struggle with on his own (or, mostly alone — Mao’s been friends with Ritsu long enough for Ritsu to know and be able to help whenever the stars misalign and Mao spirals in front of him, and there was one incredibly memorable and vaguely mortifying incident with Keito that Mao tries very hard not to think about) is now something he will always be supported through, if only he remembers to ask.
(He still isn’t the best at asking. It’s easy, when it’s late at night and Mao is trying not to disturb his roommates or once again stupidly spending the night in the student council office, to tell himself that he doesn’t need to burden his boyfriends with this. That they don’t need to come all the way to the school after hours just to help him, when he can just get through it alone again. Like he used to. Like he still can.
But Mao knows that isn’t a healthy way to live, and he’s trying.)
“Can I touch you?” is the first thing Hokuto asks, hands hovering by his chest.
Mao takes in another juddering inhale (this one was better, this one was continuous for longer) and nods, and Hokuto takes that as his cue to pry the water bottle from Mao’s death grip. He wraps a careful arm around Mao’s waist and tug him lightly into a sitting position, knees tucked close to his chest.
The four of them had taken off their practice hoodies gradually throughout the practice, and Hokuto goes now to pick up Mao’s from where he had discarded it, draping it loosely around Mao’s shoulders. Mao exhales in stops and starts and digs his nails into his palms until it hurts and tries to remember every coping strategy he’s ever taught himself.
“Are you able to speak right now?” Hokuto asks once he’s situated himself at Mao’s side.
Mao shakes his head. It still baffles him, sometimes — the jarring sensation of reaching for words and suddenly realizing they’re not there. Like having the rug pulled out from underneath you, like going to take the next step on a flight of stairs and the drop in your stomach when you miss it completely and stumble. Makoto’s careful research after the first time it happened in front of them (and that was almost terrifying itself to remember, the rising panic in the rest of Trickstar’s voices while Mao couldn’t force out more than fractured bits of sentences to explain himself, to explain how he needed them to help) told the four of them it was a kind of going nonverbal. It still frustrates Mao, no matter how many times it happens.
“Okay,” Hokuto says, and he exhales deeply, and then he wraps an arm around Mao, pulling Mao over until his head is resting on his shoulder. The contact burns, almost — but in a way that grounds Mao, pulls him back down to earth a little bit, and Mao can struggle his way through another shaky inhale. “Count your breaths for me,” Hokuto says, and Mao does — eight counts in, eight counts out. It’s like dance practice, almost. The familiarity is a flimsy tether that Mao holds tight to.
Hokuto doesn’t say anything about the way Mao’s breaths shake and falter, just reaches the hand that isn’t around Mao up to undo his hair clip and starts combing his fingers through the strands. The light pressure on his scalp burns, too, but Mao eight-counts his way through another inhale and lets himself lean into the touch, eyes fluttering shut.
The hand in his hair stills, and Mao’s eyes snap open — and then Hokuto is reaching down, to where Mao’s arms are wrapped around himself and his hands are balled into fists, the burn of pain as his fingernails dig into the soft flesh of his palms different — so much worse, so much better — than Hokuto’s warmth.
Hokuto’s fingers are strong and yet gentle as they pull Mao’s fingers from a fist to a flat, open position, shifting his arms until his palms are flat against the tops of his knees. “I know it helps, Mao,” Hokuto says, and his voice is as achingly gentle as his touch, “but pain isn’t a good grounding technique.”
Mao nods wordlessly, because Hokuto’s right and he’s been trying to break this habit of his for a while, and lets his fingers flex uselessly as Hokuto’s hand takes up its position in Mao’s hair again.
“Sari! Hokke! We got the snacks!”
Subaru’s voice is loud, grating and crackling and dizzying, as he enters the practice room, and Mao buries his face deeper into Hokuto’s chest completely instinctively, barely managing to suppress a wince. Guilt floods him almost immediately after, and it’s all he can do to keep eight-counting through his breaths, to keep rubbing his palms against the tops of his knees, to beg and beg and beg the way his thoughts keep racing in no direction in particular and his chest is tightening so much he feels like his heart is going to pop, like a balloon, to stop.
“Subaru,” Hokuto says, and Mao feels the rumble of Hokuto’s voice in his chest. Hokuto doesn’t say anything aloud after that, but Mao has a sneaking suspicion that Hokuto mouthed something to the returning Trickstar members, because when a voice next fills the room it’s Subaru’s again, but this time considerably quieter and a lot closer.
“Sari, Sari,” Subaru says, voice so soft and lilting that it’s practically a coo, and then there’s another warmth settling on Mao’s other side, a hand that rests on the awkward, trembling curve of Mao’s spine, rubbing soft circles through the fabric of Mao’s practice jacket. Mao burns, he aches, he draws in breath after shaking breath and counts to eight. “You’re doing so good, Sari! Just keep focusing on your breathing, okay?”
There’s the sound of movement in front of him, and then Mao is lifting his head from where it was buried in Hokuto’s chest — and it feels like it weighs a thousand tons, like he is Atlas struggling against the impossible weight of the sky, and for an incredibly brief and gut-wrenching moment Mao can only think about how pathetic he must be right now — to see Makoto kneeling in front of him.
“Mao,” Makoto says, and the stretch of Makoto’s lips around his name is so gentle that Mao thinks he might cry, “can I hold your hands?”
Mao’s hands are currently performing a strange dance against his kneecaps, all in the name of using as much conscious thought as he can spare to keep them from curling up again into fists — he rubs his palms against the knees of his pants, tenses his fingers until they are flattened completely, stretches them out until they are splayed and lets them fall, limp, against his legs. He nods, because he can’t do much else right now, and Makoto’s hands are falling into his, meeting him halfway, intertwining their fingers until Mao can’t do much else but tremble and squeeze.
“They’re cold,” Makoto murmurs, and he squeezes Mao’s hands lightly, just enough pressure and contact to be dizzying.
He takes in a breath, onetwothreefourfivesixseveneight , and the bumps are smoothed over. (Mao’s breath jumps and trembles on the exhale, and there is pang of disappointment in his chest at the failure, but there is a chorus of yes good just like that you’re doing so well keep breathing for us from all around him, and the lump of disappointment smooths itself over, too.)
Mao isn’t sure how long they sit like that, Subaru and Hokuto comforting weights and warmths at his sides, Makoto holding fast to his trembling hands. He loses his already tenuous grasp on time easily when the world shatters and shakes around him like this, and it is not until long after the fact that it returns, flighty, to his fingertips. All Mao knows is that he takes in a series of breaths, one after another after another, that comes — not easily, but easier , and smooth, and his body stops trembling like a leaf in a storm and instead like the purring radiator in his dorm room, and he has put enough parts of himself back together to become someone again.
He takes stock of himself, as much of it as he can handle. Mao’s eyes ache, a few tears still drying on his cheeks; his body feels weak and limp, all the tension draining slowly and leaving him raw and open and tired, so achingly tired.
“Feeling better?” Makoto asks, murmurs, the words buzzing pleasantly as they dance along Mao’s skin.
“Yeah,” Mao says, and the word scrapes its way up a thorn-hoarse throat but it escapes him, and that is a success unto itself. He shifts, minutely, and Hokuto and Subaru mold to him, move with him, and Mao is suddenly all too aware again of the vulnerability, of the strange thickness underneath his tongue.
“S-sorry,” Mao says, forces out, words barely more than a whisper, a half-formed instinct.
The reaction is almost instantaneous — Makoto’s hands gently squeezing his, Subaru’s grip around his waist drawing infinitesimally tighter, Hokuto’s fingertips stilling as they card through his hair. “You have nothing to apologize for,” Hokuto says, and it’s dancing the line between authoritative and gentle, and Mao swallows around the growing lump in his throat.
“I just,” Mao sighs, “feel bad.”
There are not enough words crowding the forefront of his mind for him to explain his thoughts more fully — but he has explained them before, in a darkened room, late enough that the world blurred at the edges of reality and Mao hoped they would not remember all that he said, and he knows as he says what he can that the other three can read between the lines. (He feels like a burden, is what he cannot say, is what they understand anyways, is what they will deny with vehemence and fight for Mao to understand.)
“We like taking care of Sari,” Subaru says, and he dips his chin down to press his face into the sensitive skin of Mao’s neck, lips humming softly around a kiss. “You always work too hard, do too much. Even overachievers like you can be taken care of sometimes, you know?”
Makoto smiles at him, eyes half-crescents beneath the lenses of his glasses. “It’s okay to make things easier for yourself, Mao,” he says, and the lump in Mao’s throat aches so hard that it is painful. “It doesn’t make you weak. Especially not with things like this.”
Mao bites his lip against the wave of oncoming tears, burying the bottom half of his face against his drawn-up knees. “Love you guys,” he mumbles. (Read between the lines — you make me feel safe, you help me more than you can know, you are teaching me that it is okay to be taken care of. I love you I love you I love you. )
Even without every way that the other three respond in kind (Hokuto pressing a kiss to the top of his head, Makoto squeezing his hands gently, Subaru squeezing his waist in the same breath that his lips touch, briefly, to Mao’s temple) Mao knows like the way he knows the stars will rise and dance each night — he is loved.