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Florian always has something in his mouth. Kieran wouldn’t typically notice minuscule tics like that—he’s hardly an observant person in general outside of the realm of Pokémon battling—on another person but try as hard as he might, he inevitably finds his traitorous gaze wandering back to him whenever they’re in the same vicinity. Florian has an unconscious habit of chewing on his fingernails although whether the habit was born from anxiety or sheer boredom, Kieran can’t tell. Sometimes, it’s a pencil he lethargically gnaws on as he sprawls out on Kieran’s dorm floor as if it’s a second home to him; sometimes, it’s a pen or an eraser or the little fidget cube he’s watched Florian attach and remove from his phone like clockwork find its way into his mouth. All of these observations are discounting the multiple times Kieran has seen Florian around campus when they aren’t more often than not glued at the hip guzzling down a soda or worrying his bottom lip—the latter of which he can’t ever look away from if he wanted to, perpetually glued to the pale column of Florian’s throat as his Adam’s apple bobs up and down, or the bitten-raw redness of his lips that Kieran really really really wants to—
The point is that once Kieran first noticed Florian’s particular quirk, he can’t stop noticing. The crux of the problem, for lack of a better term, reaches a peak when he spends more hours in a day transfixed on Florian’s mouth than he does on anything else; it’s an attestation to the obsessiveness he has a predisposition for when even Crispin, the guy who’s more oblivious than a sleeping Snorlax, asks why he’s always staring at Florian.
Florian’s doing it again. They’re officially gallivanting around the Coastal biome under the guise of documenting the different sizes of Finneon present and determining how environmental factors contribute to overall size. They're unofficially shirking that assignment to swim instead—dousing each other, holding impromptu breathing contests, etcetera—until Florian paddles toward shore to take a quick breather. He has a necklace in his mouth, a thin silver chain Kieran has seen him wear on occasion underneath his uniform. It must be comprised of magnets given that Kieran is physically incapable of looking away.
“You want me to bring you a drink?” Florian shouts, shaking Kieran out of his momentary trance. His hair is sticking to his forehead and his board shorts are a bit too big on him; he’d look ridiculous if anyone not named Kieran were to be polled. But he has a surprising golden tint to his skin, an empyrean type of gorgeous, even though they spend their days underneath the Unovan ocean, and Kieran falls victim to the thick current of longing jolting his entire being like he’s wont to do.
“Um.“ His gaze involuntarily falls to the pointer finger that’s replaced Florian’s necklace, face heating up despite the frigidity of the water deluging him. “It’s okay!”
Florian races back faster than the speed of light, beverage in tow, and nearly collides with him in all his splashing around. An undersized Finneon they’d halfheartedly been tracking darts away from them in the commotion as he halts a few inches in front of Kieran. This close, he can see the water dripping from his lashes, the faint sun-kissed freckles dimpling the apples of his cheeks, the slight indent on his bottom lip from gnawing on it so damn incessantly. He can feel his own mouth drying the longer they match each other’s gaze, can feel his heart threatening to burst out of his ribcage with how rapidly it’s beating.
“What’s up with you today?” Florian finally asks a second or so later, tilting his head to the side. He cracks his soda open, tipping it down his throat in three smooth goes while Kieran focuses on not imploding; his mouth is stuffed to the brim with cotton. The soda can arcs through the air as Florian hurls it toward shore, landing near a couple of startled Pikipek.
“Nothin’, what’s up with you?” he retorts, inching away. His foot grazes a pointy rock in his haste to create some space. Burying a wince with Herculean effort, he scoffs at himself and dunks himself low enough to reach a thermocline. The cold temperature does nothing for him. He nearly has a coronary when something encircles his calf—a Tentacool?—and yanks him sideways.
The culprit, thankfully not a Pokémon, beams at him, cheeky and hazy underwater, and Arceus, Kieran has never seen a sight more exquisite. He swears he’s being hypnotized as Florian latches onto his arm, intent on initiating a play fight of some sorts, but all he can do is let himself get shoved around. A few weak pushes of his own are manageable enough up until he makes the mistake of touching Florian’s chest and immediately loses the rest of the air in his lungs. He points to the surface, breaking with a loud gasp.
“I totally won,” preens Florian as he pants, swiping water out of his eyes. He bites his lip; Kieran rips his hungry eyes away, watching the clouds drift by and a flock of Pelipper soaring through the sky. “Seriously though, is everything all right?”
Everything would be all right if you would stop chewing your fucking lip is what Kieran barely holds himself back from saying. Does Florian know how distracting he is? He has to—he has to know that he drives Kieran positively insane with want, he has to know that Kieran is irrationally, irrefutably jealous over the many, many objects that have graced Florian’s lips before he deserves the chance to. But Florian isn’t psychic and it’s not like Kieran has taken up permanent residence in his head like Florian has. He’s lucky that the other boy even agreed to be his friend again.
“Hello?” Florian says, waving a hand in front of his face. “Earth to Kieran.” He’s still biting his goddamn lip.
Kieran swallows a shaky breath down, clenching his hands into fists. “Sure, yeah, I—what did you ask me again?”
“If you’re all right?”
“Oh.”
A few beats of heavy silence blanket them as Florian stares at him, a pensive frown painting his features. “Did I do something? Is this about your jacket? Because I said I’d wash it, I just haven’t—“
“No.”
“So,” starts Florian, bringing his necklace up to his mouth again, and Kieran honestly can’t take much more of this. He’s so pretty, so painfully beautiful to look at. Kieran wants to be that necklace—he has truly sunk to new lows. “Maybe we should—”
“Why is there always somethin’ in your mouth?” interjects Kieran gracelessly. The urge to drown himself is palpable—perhaps if he concentrates hard enough, he’ll simply evaporate instead. “Aw man…”
Florian blinks, glancing down self-consciously. “I didn’t know I—huh?”
“Yeah,” mumbles Kieran, transfixed. “You do it all the time.”
“I do?” Florian hums. He starts to raise his pinky toward his lips before he freezes, mildly horrified. “Oh my Arceus, you’re right.”
“Why?”
“I—well. I don’t know. I wasn’t aware of my bad habit until now,” says Florian before his uneasy smile shifts into something a bit more mischievous, calculating, like how he appears when he’s trying to get a read on his opponent’s next move. “How’d you notice anyway? You spend a lot of time looking at me?”
Kieran gawps at him, mouth hanging open like a Magikarp. Yeah, actually. Yeah, I spend a lot of time thinking about you too. Yeah because how could I ever look away from you; you’re the brightest star in my galaxy. “No! You’re just—you’re…” he trails off, acutely aware of the heat permeating his countenance. “Maybe?”
“Maybe,” parrots Florian.
“Maybe.”
Florian snorts, tossing an arm around his shoulder, causing him to involuntarily shiver. “Maybe or definitely?”
“Do I hafta answer that?”
His hand drifts down to his bicep, squeezes, and Kieran swiftly conjures a desperate prayer to any deity out there that Florian somehow won’t comment on his rapid heartbeat. He burrows his head onto his shoulder; Kieran doesn’t have enough time to stop the small, pleased sigh that escapes his traitorous throat. “If you don’t, you leave me no choice…”
Before Kieran can react, Florian’s dragging him into another fight, kicking and grappling for dear life as they sink underwater yet again. He squints to get a solid bearing of his surroundings and receives a faceful of Florian smiling broadly like a maniac, toothy and all. In all honesty, they probably both resemble maniacs, shouting and giggling at each other for no apparent reason. It’s a hopeless wish to wipe the grin from his own face, cheeks starting to hurt from the force of it. He’s about to attempt a shoulder jab but Florian is one step ahead of him (like he tends to be), connecting a flurry of soft blows before they resurface by a boulder.
“I surrender!” Kieran wheezes, breath thoroughly punched out of him, heaving deep gasps of salty sea breeze. For a moment, it looks as though Florian is going to disregard him and kick-start another round of roughhousing until he glances away, scanning the vast horizon for Arceus knows what.
“What time is it?” asks Florian out of the blue, absentmindedly nibbling on his bottom lip because of course he is.
Kieran clears his throat, consciously raises his eyes back up. “Dunno, ‘m not wearing a watch. Why?”
“Because you still have another class today, no?”
Even if the reason for skipping wasn’t floating beside him, Kieran doubts he would’ve shown his face in Unovan class. He scarcely attends that class as it is. His pronunciation of most words is less than spectacular and the professor, while she’s never explicitly voiced any discontent with him, has an understated grudge against him from his—before he got better, before the rage-induced fog clinging to him for months on end dissipated into wisps of smoke. He can see it in the thin line of her lips when she hands assignments back with a big fat C emblazoned on the margin and the way she readily avoids suggesting he attend her office hours despite the fact that he probably sorely needs to. Shuddering, he turns to Florian, observing two Luvdiscs playing with each other through half-lidded eyes. “No.”
“Liar,” says Florian, adopting a fond little grin that makes Kieran’s heart ache. Their fingertips brush underwater, twin icicles. “I know you have Unovan soon.”
Their eyes meet. Kieran really wants to kiss him. Wants to lick the saltwater off his tongue, wants to snake an arm around his waist and never let go, wants intimate knowledge of what it’s like to be Florian’s necklace, his fingers, his fidget toys, his everything. He sucks in a quiet breath through his teeth, veins thrumming with renewed energy.
“I don’t care about skipping, I want to…“ Be with you. “Keep swimming.”
“You can’t just skip class, dude.”
“Watch me,” replies Kieran, waving a flippant hand around.
“I’ve never met this Kieran before,” teases Florian as he settles a gentle palm on Kieran’s shoulder. “Y’know the ocean will be here when you get back.”
“But you won’t.”
“Huh?” Florian’s mouth twists into a complicated pout. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I meant like, um… you won’t be here if I go to class. You have better stuff to do.”
“Oh! Nah, don’t worry, I don’t actually have anything to do today—not anything that’s more important than you anyway. I’ll wait.”
Kieran’s ears burn. At this point, he thinks he spends more of his life flustered than he does non-flustered. It’s better than the unfeeling, unflinching trainer he was; that’s the outlook on life he’s working on incorporating into himself at least. “No, I—no, I couldn’t—wouldn’t ask you to. I just, I don’t wanna leave. I want… yeah.”
“You want?”
“I-I don’t know.”
“I’ll tell you what I want: you to go to class so we can resume our date,” says Florian so insouciantly that Kieran almost misses the last half of the sentence.
“You jus’ want me to—what?!”
“Hm?” asks Florian as though he hasn’t taken a bat to Kieran’s fragile worldview and shattered it in a span of a microsecond. The cogs in his brain are functioning overtime—did he mean to say that? Had he somehow misheard him? Is he joking?
“What’d you say?”
“I want you to go to class?” Florian responds, low and sincere, like Kieran is the weird one here. And maybe he is most—if not all of—the time but Florian can’t—he can’t just…
“Aw man, don’t mess with me like that.” Kieran sighs. Though he’s made so much progress and amends with the League Club (the general school population is a bit of a different story but… no use in dwelling), there’s still a tiny part of him, buried in scattered shards of resentment, obsession, jealousy, not enough love, or too much of it, that can’t handle Florian making fun of him. Betraying him again.
“I’m not playing,” titters Florian, necklace once again magically in his mouth, too close for comfort. He flicks Kieran’s bangs. He practically occupies a permanent spot in Kieran’s personal space now that he’s really thinking about it. Kieran wonders how he didn’t notice before but he considers the prospect that he never did because he too is always seeking Florian out, ignorantly or not. Venomoths to each other’s flame or something like that, he’d like to dream.
“Were we—was this s’posed to be a—“ Kieran coughs into his hand, unable to glean Florian’s reaction, terrified of what he’ll discover. He can barely whisper out a timid “… date?”
“Uh,” he replies. “Wasn’t that obvious?”
“Florian!” wails Kieran, burying his head in his hands. “You can’t—I don’t even—“
“Okay, whoa! I’m sorry… wasn’t I pretty clear when I specified us going alone, with like, all of the hearts I drew though? That—there’re so many Luvdiscs in this area too, so I thought… it didn’t have to be just biology homework. I thought it didn’t.” Florian prods him the short distance back to shore, babbling faster than a radio announcer all the meanwhile, and the most energy Kieran has to assist him is to paddle like a limp Poké Doll. Dear Arceus, what is his life?
“Wait.” He stops short, hands unfurling where they were adjusting his wrinkled shirt. “The picnic we went on last week? Did you know that was a date?”
“I…” One, two, three intensely wobbly breaths. “I think—think I’m havin’ a heart attack.”
Florian’s on him in an instant and if Kieran were happening to be experiencing one, he’s a thousand percent sure that would’ve caused asystole. “What’s happening? Do I need to get a nurse? Carmine?”
“No, I—don’t call Carmine but—ugh, hold on.”
Agonizingly enough, Florian unsticks himself from Kieran, fixing him with a concerned expression, an overwhelming amount of an emotion that Kieran doesn’t dare to define flickering in his irises. A niggling sense of déjà vu wears at him. It takes him a good twenty seconds to compose himself, hand knocking uselessly against his thigh. What good could he have possibly done to warrant that expression from him? How can someone as ethereal as Florian regard someone like Kieran with so much care despite it all?
Despite it all.
“How long have we been…” Kieran still has to whisper. “Dating?”
“We can start now?” Florian shrugs. How Florian is so consistently calm about everything twenty-four-seven is a mystery to him. He has such an unshakable demeanor: easygoing and charming and everybody’s friend. But he’s more personable with Kieran, more vulnerable. He tells him countless stories of his struggles to reach Champion-ranked status, saunters into Kieran’s dorm like he pays rent there, buys him Vitamins and little knick-knacks all the time. They go on picnics together, an activity he doesn’t think (hope) Florian does with any of their peers and wait for each other after classes. He knows that Florian can’t sleep at all some nights and he knows that Florian now knows that Kieran doesn’t magically fall out of his dorm bed in the middle of the night, coincidentally near his sleeping bag.
Carmine once said that Kieran lives in Florian’s shadow when he’d gotten on her nerves, a stupid incident where he’d left her makeup and bathroom door open in eating distance of Mightyena. He wonders if Florian has been living in his too. He’s not the type of boy to revolve around somebody else though; Florian shines all on his own. He doesn’t need Kieran like Kieran needs him, doesn’t cling to him like a dying man would to oxygen.
“Kieran,” says Florian, more resigned than Kieran has ever heard him sound in his life, fist clenched around his backpack strap. Kieran’s frantic train of thought is successfully derailed at the melancholy permeating his voice—he shouldn’t ever sound like that, not around Kieran. He aims a subdued smile at him. “We don’t have to. I’m really sorry.”
“Wait, but how long?”
“You’re running late.” He steps away and stumbles back into Kieran’s harsh grip.
“I don’t care about dumb Unovan class! I just, I didn’t—I didn’t know.” Kieran blinks at his glove wrapped around Florian’s forearm, how warm he is, full of life. The sun itself. “I didn’t know I already—wowzers, this is so… too much to process. Man.”
“Man,” states Florian, a smidge too serious, and when Kieran glances up, his eyes drift down to that silver chain back in the corner of his mouth. It’s a taunt—it’s the same distraction it’s been all day, all night too because Florian envelops so much of him, he’s somehow invaded Kieran’s dreamscape.
“If you thought we were dating.” He pauses, trying to straighten his posture despite the blood rushing through his ears and queasiness in his stomach. Pokémon matches are such a different type of adrenaline; the feeling is expected, controlled, unlike anything about his relationship with Florian. “Why haven’t we done something else already?”
“I assumed we were taking it slow.” Florian taps the side of his forearm, a disjointed anxious little rhythm. “What are you tryi—“
Kieran leans in too eagerly, smacking their foreheads together, but the endeared reserved semblance of a laugh he earns lights a fire in his sternum. He gets lost in it, in the hysterical rumble of Florian’s voice that he wants to nestle himself in like a well-worn blanket, in the gossamer tuft of his bangs dangling in front of his visage. He wants to try again but he finds himself pressing his face into the crook of his neck instead, hooking his arms around his waist.
“Y-you dummy,” he huffs out, half delirious.
“Getting some real mixed signals here,” laments Florian, settling his squashed hands on Kieran’s hips.
“I really… how long could I have had this though?”
“Since you gave me an Applin, I guess.”
Kieran racks his memories—jeez, that was so many weeks ago—for anything that could’ve stuck out at that particular moment, any sign that a trace of his feelings could be requited. Florian happily traded him an Applin back and then they’d gone to the cafeteria where he had proceeded to almost release Miraidon and step on a girl’s foot. “Wowzers. It—is it always supposed to be so easy? I thought you would—that you’d never see me like that. Never.”
“But I do,” intones Florian, breath hot in his ear. “If you wanna do something about that. Dummy.”
Kieran very much does. He thinks as he snags Florian’s necklace chain, idly toying with it as he reconnects their lips, maybe it can be this easy. Maybe I can have everything I’ve ever wanted.