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He hates English class.
He hates a lot of things, actually. Like the way the afternoon sun beats down on him right then; like the cut on his arm that stings in the humid air; like the fact that his phone is lying on the ground just out of arm’s reach; like how his stomach hurts every time he breathes.
He hates how he can never bring himself to hit back. He hates the sound of the late bell; hates how he’s stuck between just crawling home to quietly wallow in pain or drag himself up to English class right now.
Fucking English. Sasaki hates English.
The stupid language makes no sense. It’s needlessly difficult and – worst of all: compulsory.
He could’ve really done without learning random phrases he’s never going to use in his life. Probably. Maybe if they’d been teaching them how to curse…
He grits his teeth and swallows down the grunt of pain to curl in on himself, blocking the sun out of his eyes. If he could just fold into himself far enough – maybe he could disappear altogether.
Blue. He’s ‘feeling blue’, he supposes.
He doesn’t quite understand the expression. How does one feel a colour? The only reason he could even manage to remember the phrase was because Hirano’s eyes are blue, and when Hirano punches it hurts like hell and the look of disapproval he gives after makes you feel guilty and sad. It’s an easy association to make.
How did he even get into this situation? Why him?
How is he even supposed to get up and go anywhere with the way his abdomen is throbbing? It hurts to even move, and he can’t even bring himself to cry about it. He hates the heat and he’s stuck outside hiding from Hirano in the blistering sun. If only- if only he could cease to exist right about now, just- just for a moment. Disappear with a ‘poof’ into thin air and reappear when things are a little more bearable, maybe. A moment’s respite would be nice.
He sighs into his palm and presses his fingers into his scalp hard enough to hurt. Why must everything in his life be so incredibly annoying right now? If he could just- if- if-
“Sasaki senpai?”
At the sound of that voice, his eyes whip open of their own accord.
He turns around, and he sees blue.
For a moment – just one moment – he doesn’t feel any pain anymore, if only because he forgets to breathe.
Miyano frowns at him from the window, face twisted up in concern. The slight curls in his hair stick up in the humidity, looking messy and fluffed up and…and adorable. His baby blue sweater hangs off his small frame, melting seamlessly into the blue-grey shadows that promise respite from the heat.
He takes the band-aid that is offered, and it doesn’t feel quite so annoying.
The giggles bubble up his chest so suddenly it takes him by surprise. He laughs out what feels the weight of the world, feeling free. With each chuckle, that lump of lead sitting heavy behind his ribs gets lighter and lighter and lighter and then- then he’s weightless, simply floating in the honey-brown molasses of Miyano’s eyes.
He doesn’t mean to say it. He doesn’t know quite what he means, really.
“Will you go out with me?”
The instant rejection isn’t annoying. The questioning glance isn’t annoying. Nothing is annoying.
When Miyano departs, he leaves Sasaki with a new weight to carry around inside his chest. Unlike the lump of lead, this weight is warm, grounding. It rumbles with his chest when he chortles, and- fleetingly, Sasaki wonders when the last time was that he was so happy he could do nothing else but laugh.
The sun dips behind the buildings eventually to bring him some shade.
He looks up. The sky is blue.
His belly still hurts. From laughing so hard.
***
Sasaki comes to learn certain things over the next few months.
Primary among such discoveries is that life is infinitely better when he can be with Myaa-chan.
Being around his cute new kouhai has opened up possibilities he could never have imagined. Waking up early is easier now. He even finds himself eager to go to school every day. His music sounds more…melodic in his ears. Food seems to taste better. Colours look brighter.
For some reason, he finds himself drawn to blue.
It’s astounding how he seemingly never noticed before. But now that he’s looking, it’s everywhere.
Blue is in his friends’ eyes – Ogasawara’s, Hirano’s. It glitters in Hirano’s earrings when the light bounces off them in the late afternoon sun. It shines stark against the black of Ogasawara’s hair. It crowds the school hallways on formal days, draped on students’ shoulders and tied clumsily around waists.
But most of all, he finds it nestled between Miyano’s long and delicate fingers, crinkling under fluorescent lights. His eyes are drawn to the way the navy sits against the baby blue of Miyano’s sweater when he clutches the bag close to his chest, away from prying eyes.
He breathes blue every time he says to Miyano, “lend me another one, will you?”
And he drowns in it each time Miyano turns to him and says “of course!” with that sparkle in his eyes.
***
He keeps finding him in the hallways.
And Miyano keeps smiling at him, keeps gracing him with the sound of his voice, keeps pressing well-loved pages into his hands like he’s not afraid of the crinkles Sasaki makes on the paper becoming indistinguishable from his own.
As the days go by, something swells within his chest. That warm, comforting weight he was nursing under his ribs grows heavier, and he wonders how much longer he can hold on.
***
“The chicken game is really popular in my class right now.”
“So? Don’t tell me you’re actually playing that.”
“I dunno…I thought it might be fun to play with you!”
“WHY WOULD YOU THINK THAT-”
“Everyone else is doing it! I thought if it wasn’t sweet you might want to try.”
“Why do you get these kinds of ideas in your head, senpai?”
“Come on! It’ll be fun! Who knows, maybe at the end we can get a lucky-”
“SENPAAAAI!”
When Miyano bites into the treat, the sounds of it seem to echo through the empty classroom.
Light blue curtains billow around the open windows, casting fleeting shadows on them. The slight vibration caused by the bites travel trembling through Sasaki’s fingertips, and he tries not to crumble with it.
The deafening drumbeat of his heart drowns out the quiet sound of Miyano’s chewing, and his fingers scratch a discordant tune on the packaging of the treats, a whisper away from crushing it to dust.
“You can keep the box”, he mumbles somehow, and hopes it didn’t sound too much like I want you as he leaves the room.
***
It would be so easy to collapse under the weight of it all. It would be so simple, to just let go. To give in to the urge to reach out and gather soft blue wool into his hands, to tug. To curl his hands around delicate but solid shoulders and just pull. To bury his face into soft black curls and breathe in what he imagines is the scent of blue.
“Why do you dye your hair orange, senpai?”
“Want me to dye it a different colour?”
“No no no- that’s not what I meant at all! I was just curious why you chose orange…I asked Hirano senpai why he bleaches his hair and he said that blonds look cool – which is frankly a very uke thing to say – so I was wondering why you keep your hair orange.”
Miyano peers at him with eager eyes that sparkle with curiosity. Sasaki can tell that he wants to talk more about how the choice of hair colour lends itself to furthering his headcanons about Hirano, but instead, here he is asking about Sasaki’s hair.
It could be so very easy to touch cheeks that blush easily and gauge their softness. To press a body up against his own and wrinkle the crisp white of that shirt. To lace his own fingers through Miyano’s and kiss the pale blue veins that line his wrists.
He doesn’t, though.
Instead, he hides his rising blush with a hand and responds with the only thing that springs to mind. “It’s my favourite colour.”
“Oh!”
Miyano’s eyes go round at that. Sasaki doesn’t understand why this is such a topic of interest for the shorter boy, but nevertheless he resists the urge to bend down and kiss the mole that decorates his left cheekbone.
The drink he bought rattles to the vending machine window, but Miyano continues to stare. Sasaki stands, frozen in the empty hallway they have found themselves in and reminds himself to breathe. There’s something in his gaze, in the way the late afternoon light reflects off the brown in his pupils, turning them into warm pools of honey.
After what feels like the longest time, Miyano speaks. “It suits you.”
“You think?” Sasaki croaks in return.
And maybe he’s imagining it, maybe it’s a trick of the light, but there’s a rosy tint to Miyano’s cheeks when he breathes out, “It reminds me of the sunset.”
***
“Want to find out whether I’m clumsy with my tongue?”
For that split second it takes for Miyano to process the words, Sasaki’s skin buzzes like a humming star.
He says no, of course, and Sasaki wasn’t really being serious to begin with.
Or so he tells the growing ball of heat straining against his ribs.
The taste of chocolate lingers on his burnt tongue.
He wonders if Miyano’s mouth tastes like chocolate now, too. The empty can clinks against the concrete when he puts it down, and he wonders what it must be like to touch a warm tongue to cold lips. How does it feel to be held by those hands he so desperately wants to touch? How would it feel to press against those fingers in the cold and warm it with his own body burning hot as the sun?
He tries not to think about it too much. His lungs ache with the effort of breathing around the swell of feelings that struggle to overwhelm him at every step.
What would it take to be loved in return?
What would it take? To be touched tenderly like the way Miyano handles his books – like he’s precious? To have those supple cheeks flush red like winter apples not for shame of being spotted in public reading BL but – but instead when the word ‘love’ drips from his lips? What would it take to be the one clutched so close to his beating heart instead of taboo books wrapped in plastic? To cling to those shoulders like that baby blue sweater like a second skin?
He walks back home that day draped in the orange hues of sunset. He tries not to think about cherry-stained cheeks and chocolate-coated tongues.
***
He’s always hated the heat.
When Miyano joins him behind the school building, cast in the cool shadows of a tree, that floating feeling returns.
His hair is damp and his white shirt clings translucent to his skin in certain places, and for a maddening second Sasaki wonders if he could quench his thirst by tracing his tongue over the lines of sweat dripping down Miyano’s throat.
He’s tried to fight it. He has reached down into the very depths of his soul and chained himself to the last remaining dregs of rationality for the longest time.
But time is only an illusion.
Sasaki has tried not to collapse under the weight of his own heart. He has gazed at too many sunsets, and he has tried not to count all the hues of blue that follow them into the night. He has watched waves upon waves crash on to sandy beaches tinted orange at dusk, and he has tried not wonder about the depths of blue that lie beneath the ocean.
He has spent far too many late evenings looking at the horizon. How do you know where the earth ends and the sky begins, when you’re drowning in a world of blue? How can you even think, when you know that sunrise will paint tangerine onto the clouds?
It happens all too suddenly.
Like a star expanding and expanding until it collapses into itself, Sasaki too feels a new density in his chest that only comes with definition.
He has never truly taken an interest in astronomy. Perhaps it was because he never had to consider what it takes to compress something infinite into something he could comprehend.
He thinks about pulsars and neutron stars, about lighthouses and that persistent hum under his skin, about a celestial rhythm in his heart. He thinks about blue.
He has been gravitating towards Miyano all this while. He has been formed and reformed and, in this moment, in this very mundane moment on a hot summer afternoon, he finally gives in. It feels like too momentous an event, but paradoxically, simultaneously trivial. This sort of thing happens every day, he’s sure, to people that are not him. Stars are born and stars die every day, and he’s never given it a passing thought.
But Miyano draws him in, in that way only he can, and Sasaki is powerless to resist. Time bends around him so profoundly in Sasaki’s world – minutes turn into days and seconds into hours and moments become eternity. It’s only natural.
“I love you, Miyano”, he says simply.
Because it is simple. It’s easy. It has been all this time.
***
Miyano lets him get away with too much.
He lets him borrow his books and ruffle his hair and walk with him to and from the train station. He lets him sit pressed up against him on the train, like Sasaki won’t burn through their clothes. He lets Sasaki flirt and he lets Sasaki watch him blush, without a care for how it paints roses behind his eyelids.
Miyano doesn’t bat an eye when Sasaki wraps his fingers around his wrist and just- pulls.
He doesn’t push him away when Sasaki all but traps him between his body and a pile of blankets in an empty classroom. He doesn’t flinch when Sasaki shudders against him in the muted shadows of hidden corners in school.
He doesn’t run away when Sasaki tells him he loves him with his whole heart.
He stands there and listens when Sasaki breathes his soul out with his words and instead, he smiles.
“Do you want to walk around the festival with me later?”
He doesn’t mind when Sasaki presses his face into the crook of his neck and sighs.
He lets Sasaki hold his hand and learn the way their fingers feel nestled between each other’s.
***
“I like being around you, Senpai”, Miyano tells him one day, like it means nothing.
“You have a nice smile”, he says carelessly, like it won’t shatter Sasaki’s fragile heart with tenderness.
“I admire Sasaki senpai a lot as a senior. I think he’s really nice and very cool”, he says casually to Ogasawara, unaware of how the oxygen he breathes fuels the raging fire in Sasaki’s chest.
“I’m rooting for you! I know you will do well in your exams, Senpai!” He smiles sweetly like he doesn’t understand the weight of his words. Like he doesn’t know how Sasaki will sell his soul to bring every single one of Miyano’s utterances to fruition.
“Can…can you wait a little longer for my answer?” he asks, as if Sasaki wouldn’t wrestle the universe itself to make time stand still if Miyano asked for it.
***
It’s a cold, cold day in the first week of January, and Miyano’s stained shirt is falling off his shoulders.
“Tashiro tripped and spilled his drink all over me, so now I have to wait for him to bring me something to wear from lost and found”, he mumbles with rosy cheeks when Sasaki finds him.
“Is that why you’re holed up in this empty classroom?” Sasaki asks his shoes.
“Yeah.”
Miyano is sheepish with his smile, and it’s so cold.
Sasaki knows he must be embarrassed to be seen like this, but he feels rooted to his spot when his mind starts to wonder whether the blush on Miyano’s cheeks is only from the chill in the air.
“It’s cold, huh”, Sasaki says in lieu of commenting on how the half-unbuttoned shirt is exposing his collarbones.
“Yeah.”
And it is. Cold.
His voice is strangely raspy. Sasaki does his best to not pay too much attention to it.
There’re distant voices out in the hall and Miyano is cold in this empty classroom, and Sasaki’s hand automatically reaches to lock the door behind himself.
Miyano doesn’t react to the sound of the lock clicking beyond the blush deepening on his cheeks and spreading down his neck.
Sasaki tries not to think about why that is as he unthinkingly walks closer.
There’s a light stain on the shirt near the collar. It clashes oddly with the rosy hue painted across the exposed skin of Miyano’s chest.
He realizes he’s never seen the younger boy without his trademark blue sweater at school. It makes his stomach do a strange flip in his belly as the buzzing returns to his skin.
He really shouldn’t be doing this. He shouldn’t be here.
Miyano shouldn’t look so red with only him in the room.
But it’s so cold today. His fingers are freezing, and Miyano’s cheeks look so warm.
His lungs are heavy with air as he watches the back of his fingers make contact with Miyano’s burning cheek. The raven-haired boy’s eyelids flutter at that, and Sasaki’s heart thrums with it.
There’s something unfurling in his chest at the touch. A creature named desire he has had chained to his ribs. A creature whose hunger he is feeding, selfishly, as he drags his hand down soft, silky skin slowly – ever so slowly, towards that delicate collarbone that calls out to him.
A small hand fists into the clothes against his chest, fingers scorching him through the fabric. Miyano sighs softly, and Sasaki’s mind fogs with it.
The creature rumbles as he touches the tip of his nose to the underside of Miyano’s jaw, and the hand on his chest tightens. His nose is cold but Miyano is warm, and when he gently nuzzles at the shorter boy – touching just the tip of his nose to his skin to draw a line from his jawline to his collarbone – all in one excruciatingly slow breath, he shivers under him.
Sasaki suspects it’s not because of the cold.
Miyano makes a sound he elects to ignore for the sake of his own sanity, and instead he takes in a lungful of oxygen, drunk on the scent of laundry detergent and cinnamon and books and something just this side of sweet-
He’s supposed to be waiting. He should be waiting.
But one of Miyano’s hands is on his chest and the other is clutching onto the hem of his sweater, and he’s-
He’s burning up.
It’s so very cold today, but Sasaki is burning.
And he’s laid his head on Miyano’s shoulder before. And he isn’t being pushed away. And Miyano’s skin is so soft. And he’s not going to do anything.
Maybe he’s allowed to be a little selfish.
Maybe he can be selfish for now, when time flows sluggish like molasses and every moment seems like an eternity and Miyano sighs under his touch like he wants it.
How much, though?
How selfish is he allowed to be?
Can he kiss that dip in Miyano’s collarbone? Can he trace his tongue along it? Can he perhaps press his mouth to his neck, and suck loving bruises into existence? Can he paint new hues of blue on the canvas of his skin, with his own lips?
The creature inside his chest growls, and Sasaki growls with it.
But he promised to wait, and this timeless bubble of warmth they have found themselves in bursts with the gasp that escapes Miyano’s lips.
The nascent apology dies in the parched desert of Sasaki’s throat when Miyano looks up at him with something in his eyes and whispers, “Can you wait just a little longer?”
Sasaki’s heart thuds deafening in his ears when the hand still fisted in his clothes unfurls and splays itself across his chest instead. Miyano’s forehead comes to thump softly against his thrumming heart and he feels rather than hears the words spoken searing into his skin. “I want to give you my answer…after Tashiro returns with some clothes for me…today…”
He tries not to shudder at the words vibrating against his ribs. “…so can you please wait…just a little bit longer?”
There’s a lump made of anticipation and anxiety and hope and fear in his throat, so instead of speaking he curls a gentle hand around Miyano’s bare shoulder and nods against his hair.
He can wait. He’s been waiting for a thousand years. He can wait a thousand more, for Miyano.