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The rooftops are familiar, the breeze still blows through his hair, though it's longer now. The ghost of his touch living in the dead ends. The view is mostly the same, more buildings, perhaps. Trees having grown taller in the years, but it's still familiar.
This place is known, and yet, the air to his left is cold, stagnant.
Today is an anniversary, the day the world lost a hero, and Shouta Aizawa lost a friend. He can't remember making the decision to climb back up to the roof, their usual lunch break haunt. The word couldn't be more fitting, he thinks distantly that Oboro would have found that funny, it makes his chest ache. Despite the choice being mostly subconscious, it seems that years of being around the same person will have them knowing you, and your mind.
Hizashi climbs onto the roof, shutting the door behind him. The gel that usually holds his hair tall and proud seems to be failing him today. Shouta can see it clearly, the blonde man trying to run his fingers through his hair as nerves eat away at him, only to end up chipping away at the upturned do until it falls over his shoulders, casting shadows over unusually dark eyes.
He walks to Shouta's right side, placing a steady hand on his shoulder, and they stare together in silence over the UA grounds, mourning the arms that should be wrapped around both of them, pulling them obnoxiously close. If he could go back, Shouta thinks, he would have never pulled away from one of those hugs, like he did almost every time, he would have wrapped his arms around the boy and told him 'We need you', said 'It isn't worth your life'. And still he thinks it wouldn't have changed the outcome. Oboro was good, he would put his life on the line every time if it meant saving someone else. The images flash behind his eyes, blood, concrete, dust, that phantom voice, he swears he heard through the comms, leading him, urging him on.
"Do you remember," Hizashi starts, his voice quiet as he takes a step to the side, breaking the moment of contact. "The first time we came up here?"
The memories slip into his mind like fog, blocking out the one that tears at his insides.
"Yes, he picked you up on a cloud. Threatened to hold you over the edge of the roof if you didn't give him half of your dessert." Aizawa says gruffly. Hizashi laughs, a small huff of air.
"I should have just given him the whole thing, his sweet tooth was unrivaled,"
It's weird the things you regret once someone dies. Not giving them a whole dessert, not hugging them that one time out of a hundred, things Oboro probably never even thought twice about suddenly feel like a betrayal.
"Don't know why he didn't just buy his own dessert every day," Shouta mumbles, crossing his arms over his chest as the breeze blows through the fabric of his shirt.
"I think he just liked to share, I only bought them half the time because I knew he wouldn't."
"You just let him use you for your desserts?"
"Yeah," Hizashi smiles, the tease falls flat and his response is nothing but genuine and aching. He steps closer and leans against the safety rail beside Shouta, looking down at the familiar walkways of the campus, they'd changed in some places since they were students, Cementoss fixing or moving certain paths to accommodate new buildings or quirk accident fallout. He wonders, briefly, if Oboro would have gotten lost on his way to class in this new U.A, or if he'd just summon a cloud and float above it all despite their Sensei's scolding him for unsanctioned quirk usage.
"He was like a little kid, just wanted whatever the others already had."
"He was older than you," Shouta reminds tilting his head up to watch the clouds drift by. Oboro was the oldest of the group by a handful of months, liked to hang it over their heads as if it made him wiser.
"He's still just a kid,"
Those words lodge into Hizashi's throat, and he clears it roughly. Boys shouldn't cry, men certainly don't. Not even men who can't even conjure an image of what Oboro would look like as a man. How he'd act, if he'd have changed his hero costume design like he had or stick to his first design like Shouta. If he'd have stuck to his word and made them all build an agency together, if he'd be disappointed that he and Shouta hadn't. When he tries to picture him, all he sees is a boy, he hadn't seemed so young back then, but now he sees a kid. A boy with soft hair and kind eyes. With a smile that made his stomach twirl and his heart race. His face hadn't even lost all of it's baby fat yet, or at least he thinks it hadn't, maybe Oboro just had soft features that he would grow into. Men get better with age, some say. Some don't age at all.
"I can't think of him with us, past second year. I just, can't imagine him as anything but who he was the last time I saw him." His hands tighten into fists where they rest over the rail.
"He'd have been the best of us. Limelight, definitely, the attention seeker." Shouta speaks gruffly, but fond. Hizashi envies his ability to look back in fondness. He's been left behind, not only by Oboro, but by Shouta in his grief. He knows they'll both be mourning for the rest of their lives, but he just can't fathom how Shouta's seemed to move on enough to look back fondly, while he's stuck in this bitter, endless pocket of time, between clinging on and letting go.
"Top thirty, at least. Maybe higher, but if I know him, he'd have focused too much on rescue, and visiting children's hospitals or something to get enough takedown stats to break the top ten. His approval rating would be through the roof."
Hizashi bites his tongue as Shouta muses. He was right, that's how Oboro had been. But they'll never know if it's who he would be.
"Do you remember that week you took off around the second sports festival?"
Shouta turns to look at Hizashi for the first time since he'd appeared on the roof at the seemingly unrelated question, a furrow in his brows, etched into place with creases and crows feet.
"Yeah. What about it?"
"That was the first time he kissed me," Hizashi doesn't look up, his nails scrape at his palms, but don't dig in, just enough to hold himself together, to hold back from looking up at Shouta's reaction. He'd never talked about it, him and Oboro barely had the chance to before he left. It felt wrong to give away such an intimate, vulnerable part of Oboro that had been gifted to him. But now the time that he's been gone is the same length of time that he'd been living, and he and Shouta had moved in together.
He felt the ghost of a jittery teen, flushed and grinning as he explained how he'd 'only ever really been attracted to girls before him, and wasn't sure what this meant but that he'd be willing to try'- every time him and Shouta had experimented with whatever messy shit was growing between them that eventually ended in them being 'partners'. He knew Shouta could tell, with the resigned look in his eyes whenever he turned away from kisses, or rolled over in bed until there was enough room between them that a whole other person could fit. He could feel those arms around him, tanned skin, richer than Shouta's complexion, around his waist when Oboro had broken dorm curfew and snuck into his bed. They'd shushed each other under his comforter as they'd broken into a sleep-deprived giggling fit trying to figure out how their bodies fit together without tickling Oboro's sensitive sides. In the end, it turned out that he fit perfectly with his back against Oboro's chest, and the boy's chin digging into his shoulder as he puffed stifled laughs through his nostrils right into Hizashi's ear. He hadn't slept a wink that night, his heart raced too wuickly agaisnt his ribcage as Oboro's warmth sunk into his back, soft breaths against his skin as they spoke in whispers until the sun rose around them. Now he can't sleep in the same bed as the man he thinks he could have loved in another life. His arms don't feel quite right around him.
"What?"
"We weren't, anything really. He left before we even had a word for it." He says, dismissive outwardly, maybe it's to reassure Shouta. Maybe it's because it sounds pathetic on his tongue to try and say, he was the only person I ever felt loved by and loved back, and he was taken from me barely a month after I realized that was an option.
Either way, it doesn't seem to succeed in accomplishing the first goal.
"Why didn't you tell me?" Shouta's fully turned towards him now, but he's still hunched over the railing, watching the shadows the clouds above cast on the pavement below.
"Like I said, it wasn't serious. Not worth mentioning."
"Not worth mentioning? In the almost two decades since then it hasn't been worth mentioning? We're partners, that's the type of thing I think would come up."
Hizashi huffs out of his nose and shakes his head.
"What? It's not like I'm going to leave you for him Sho'."
"But you aren't mine either, are you?"
The air feels colder between them now than it ever has in their bed, backs to each other as they claim on edge, leaving the middle empty and uninhabitable. Hizashi stares at the pavement, he can see Shouta in his periphery, the way his hands are in his pockets, but his shoulders are tense. He knows, knows that he should stand up, look him in the eyes and explain, apologize, something. But he doesn't feel anything, all he has in him is a sticky after taste on his tongue, remorse, maybe, for leading Shouta on even if that had never been his intention, but everything in him that could love had died on this day seventeen years ago.
"I don't know," He says, hollow words.
Shouta sighs heavily, his eyes closing for a few seconds as he lets what he'd already known really wash over him. He's surprised by the hurt, he'd known that Hizashi wasn't invested in the dynamic they'd fallen into. He was there, he would make dinner and kiss Shouta on the crown of his head when he napped on the couch, wash his capture weapon in the sink when he got lazy and tried to toss it in the washing machine. He'd press him down into the mattress and devour him with a ferocity he'd only ever seen in his fights, sitting in his lap, hair wild and eyes manic, riding him until he couldn't see, feel, or comprehend anything but Hizashi.
But outside of the sex, Hizashi didn't kiss him. Didn't hold him or let himself be held. He'd thought at first it was just intimacy that was the problem, but then there'd be that shadow over his eyes, when Shouta would brush his hair back and pepper light, gentle kisses from his ear to his lips. Hizashi would go cold, either pull away or turn those kisses into teeth and tongue.
He'd reserved his softness for someone that wasn't him, and he'd known it.
It hurts, because he thinks he really does love Hizashi. Maybe he doesn't know what that means, but he'd like to kiss him just to kiss him, or rest his head in his lap while he sleeps. If they never fucked again he'd feel closer to Hizashi than he ever had when inside of him.
At the same time, he could live like this, it was the best he'd get. Hizashi cared for him, he knew that. Hizashi has his back, he'll always be there when he gets home, nagging him to place his shoes nicely in the genkan when he just wants to kick them off after a late patrol and let the cat chew them to bits. Maybe he'd never be loved the way pointless, irrational movies like to portray, but he had a home. A home that fluctuated between warm and familiar, to cold and haunted on a dime.
Shouta rubs a hands down his face, rough and heavy. He rests a hand on Hizashi's leather clad shoulder for a second, squeezing as he turns around.
"I'll see you at home 'Zashi, I love you." Sometimes taking what you can get is enough to sooth the ache, just until the next time the wound opens.
"I know."