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There was almost nothing Shoto liked about his neighbourhood or his apartment.
It was never really dark here, even at night, light and sound reaching like tendrils of smoke into every crevice and threatening to disrupt his sleep. Katsuki said they’d buy black-out curtains and one of those heated blankets, but this went unsaid: that he’d continue slipping his thigh between Shoto’s in bed and breathe warm into his shoulder, like he’d started doing back in high school. It helped enough to remind Shoto of what he always looked for when Katsuki was around.
It’d been funny at first, to see Katsuki attempt to reel in his temper and speak civilly with their neighbours through gritted teeth; a very confused elderly couple, who unwittingly antagonised him at every turn because they didn’t recognise him, and a couple with two kids, who’d point at them and start screaming. Sweeter still to find Katsuki feeding scraps to the stray cats that lived around the area, or checking their mailbox—their mailbox.
Theirs theirs theirs.
That word was loud, like a pulse thundering under his skin. It declared itself for the first time plain as day and reared its many heads right in his face like Scylla, when he saw Katsuki step into their future master bedroom at the viewing and peer outside the windows. A perfect slice of sunlight had peered right back in, sparkling on his nose. And even though Shoto didn’t like the neighbourhood, that those kids had screamed at them, that nothing here seemed to sleep—
He signed the lease for the apartment.
“You’re just being dramatic,” Katsuki had said, leaning over the open window and looking down. “This place is great. Did you see that bubble tea shop right across the street? I mean, yeah, it’s overpriced as fuck but it’s still good. Why’re you making that face? I already said I’d help you pack and unpack.”
Shoto acquiesced that it’d been like something out of one of those fairytales his mother used to read to him as a kid—the apartment was his, theirs, the third thing ever Shoto could truly claim as his own.
The first was his Quirk, and the second was Katsuki.
His, his, Shoto’s.
There had been a feeling in Shoto’s chest, when he glanced up at Katsuki from the other corner of their bed, when they were stretching a freshly-washed sheet over it for the first time ever. He didn’t have a word for the feeling the first time it happened and he probably still wouldn’t have a word the trillionth time it’d happen, because he was too frightened to give it a shape. It haunted him like a demon, and he pretended to not know what it was, his empty thoughts echoing in their equally empty bedroom and bouncing back at him.
And because Katsuki was as stubborn as he was, and twice as annoying, he didn’t say anything either. So the word got pushed back, shoved deep down Shoto’s throat where it wouldn’t come out. If either of them could give a shape to what it was, Shoto was hoping Katsuki would be the first to do it.
Its shapeless form continued hovering over them like fog over a ghost town. It settled like dirt in the cracks of a sidewalk, as they hip-checked each other and bumped their way through their old rooms, packing up their things and making Katsuki scrub viciously at the spot on his jaw where Shoto had stolen kiss after kiss.
He’d spent afternoons pretending to argue with Katsuki over IKEA catalogues—staring at his rubicund cheeks like summer-sweet cherries, because irritating Katsuki always caused him to flush from all the yelling he would do—before Shoto would sit back on his heels in the middle of their still-empty, pathetic living room, press his palms into his eye sockets and stifle laughter; wondering why they even bothered moving so quickly into their unpleasant, foreign apartment when the only pieces of furniture they had on hand were their bed and a tiny closet. And Katsuki would tackle him to the floor, smelling like something from Chemical Guys, and Shoto would realise that oh, well. There was one thing not unpleasant or foreign in the apartment.
The word still felt too big for his mouth. Under the bright lights of IKEA, Shoto leaned forward and kissed Katsuki’s cheek.
Katsuki barely noticed it. He had one hand on a shopping cart and the other was gripping the list he’d spent the past few weeks filling in, as if shopping for a house was the same as buying groceries—runners, throw pillows, storage boxes. Bumerang hangers. Multicoloured Vattensten LED lighting strips. A Nödmast portable lamp, because Katsuki insisted on having his PC in their room.
“You know,” Shoto said, walking with a hand on Katsuki’s elbow, “we could buy half of those things at the dollar store. The quality would be shittier but it’s—”
“What the fuck?” Katsuki spluttered, snapping his head up to glare at Shoto. “Are you hearing yourself right now, you cheapskate?! You’re seriously thinking about skimping out on our first apartment?”
Sometimes Shoto couldn’t stand this sickly-sweet feeling shimmering beneath the surface of his skin, even as Katsuki started a spitting tirade about how Shoto’s random penny-pinching habits annoyed him and shouldn’t even exist in the first place. He was in a Todd Snyder shirt and gesturing rudely at Shoto with one hand, right as people started whispering isn’t that Dynamight? The guy who scared a flock of birds with his explosions and made them crap all over All Might’s statue?
But Shoto thought Katsuki looked so handsome; his clear face was scrunched into a scowl, marigold-warm hair short enough in the back that it gave Shoto the inexplicable urge to poke at the exposed vertebrae.
“Oh my God,” Katsuki said, patting his back pocket for his phone. “Did you know that Izuku’s been blowing up my phone non-stop? Probably worrying about how we’ve got no furniture in our house. We have a bed.”
“No, he’s right. We have no furniture.”
They’d taken the escalator up to the living room section, cart half-full with storage boxes and a large Dynamight plushie which Katsuki had threatened to incinerate with his hands, because it looks fucking ugly and why did my PR team approve this?! He turned to glare at Shoto.
“Of course you’d agree with him!” he yelled. “Because you like him so much, right?! Why don’t you go buy a house with him and marry him then!”
Shoto allowed this.
When it came to Katsuki, Shoto allowed a lot of things.
He knew there was probably a word for this. It felt like a lightning bolt on his tongue.
Katsuki had let Shoto take over the cart and he was twisting a silver ring on his finger, the metal glinting lazily in the light. In a Scandinavian-inspired living room setup, he stretched out on a corner sofa-bed, kicking his legs out like an oversized house cat.
“You’re embarrassing,” Shoto said, even as he abandoned their cart and joined Katsuki on the couch, slumping down beside him. The Dynamight plushie, as well as a couple of teenagers who were clearly only here for fun, leered at them.
Shoto took his phone out to check the time. Katsuki was his lockscreen.
“What the fuck? Let me see that. I thought I told you to delete that ugly fucking photo!”
They grappled with the phone and Katsuki jabbed a sharp elbow into Shoto’s ribs. Shoto twisted in his arms.
“I don’t care that we’re in public, don’t think that I won’t blast your pretty fa—what are you doing? Oh, fuck off, you are such a dirty fucking cheater—” but all the same Katsuki was already opening up his chest so Shoto could lean into him, cheek on his shoulder. Katsuki exhaled softly, his breath ruffling the top of Shoto’s hair.
He smelled like Creed. Shoto knew this because the aftershave section was right next to where he’d get Katsuki’s codeine from the pharmacy.
“You smell like Gordon Ramsay.”
This got him pushed away. “What?”
“It’s…a compliment?” Shoto tried. “You like Gordon Ramsay, right? Plenty of people on Hell’s Kitchen have said that he smells good, and he said on Twitter that he wore Creed.”
No one said anything else for a moment. Katsuki’s shirttails were now out and the sleeves rolled to the elbows—a vintage banker in a Baroque painting, smooth and pale. He reached over to flick Shoto’s forehead. “You’re so annoying. I can’t stand you.”
He got up to walk over to the cart and fished out the Dynamight toy, squishing it to the side of his face. “You can’t seriously want this. It’s awful, and it smells bad. You do know the second you’re not around to protect it, I’m gonna blow its fuckin’ face off.”
“Why?” Shoto asked.
“Because it’s fucking ugly, that’s why!”
“Hmm.” Shoto pretended to think. Katsuki bared his teeth in what was supposed to be a menacing snarl but it fell short, because he was pressing the toy tighter into his cheek. “Now that you mention it, I do see the similarities.”
“Die!” Katsuki threw it at him. “You really would rather date that nerd, huh? Why, am I not handsome enough for you?” He picked up a magazine from the displayed side table and held the back cover up to Shoto’s face.
You voted for the nation’s top 20 most handsome Heroes! said the headline. Katsuki was in eleventh place. The headshot used was a cropped-out screenshot of him screeching at whatever poor soul decided to film him that day. Shoto could see that his own face was in the spot above Katsuki’s, even though he’d strategically placed his fingers over it.
And it was there, right there in IKEA for their long-overdue furniture shopping—watching Katsuki plop himself down on a small Nämmarö stool and swaying the magazine in front of him, the lights spilling over his amused smile, which in itself was a sight as rare and precious as the golden Apples of the Hesperides—that Shoto felt himself teetering on the knife’s edge of that word, blooming into something almost unbearable below his ribs.
“Why’re you smiling at me like that, huh? Gonna go bragging to your daddy that your boyfriend is the eleventh handsomest Hero?”
“You know I can still see that I’m in tenth place, right?”
Katsuki flung the magazine to the floor and lunged for the stuffed toy when Shoto jammed it into his chest. “I’m gonna burn that fucker’s face off! Give it to me, I’m not going to be replaced by my own ugly fucking merch for cuddles!”
Shoto liked things that are direct and precise and hold no space for second guessing. Things like the sky is blue, the grass is green, you roll your hands into fists for a fight, and the firm press of two pairs of lips together called a kiss. The not-knowing this shapeless word was what stressed him out daily. But Katsuki in the weak light of the Isjakt floor lamp, pretending to strangle his own toy: Shoto could feel himself inching closer and closer to knowing what it was.
Shoto could only look at him. And when Katsuki stopped strangling his toy and held it up to his cheek again, grinning this time, it felt so close—so awfully close—that it threatened to erupt from him like Athena from Zeus’ forehead. It bullied its way right up to the tip of his tongue, and he could almost give it a shape.
In the parking lot, Katsuki handed his keys over to the valet.
“You’re being weird again,” he grumbled, reaching over to tug at the toy’s arm. Shoto squashed his chin into the top of its head, staring at Katsuki.
“You’ve really grown up,” he said, just so he could make Katsuki’s nostrils flare in irritation. “Back in high school, you probably would’ve exploded him on the spot. Or at the very least, you would’ve waited for me to pay for him then explode him after I’ve already forked over the money.”
“You and whose money, asshole?” Katsuki snapped. “The only things you spend your money on are those fucking pudding cups from Family Mart!” The valet was coming back with the car now. “And you better watch out, you’ll find a scorch mark on this fucker’s face sometime next week. Got it?!”
Shoto could only smash his face into the top of the toy and smile.
Katsuki would drive them back to the neighbourhood that Shoto didn’t like, take the lift up to the apartment he didn’t like, and at night they would wrestle over who would get cuddling rights with the stupid toy. And tomorrow, Shoto would sit himself up on a countertop in their kitchen and crash his heels into the cabinets below to annoy Katsuki; and Katsuki would get mad at him and threaten to blow up their dinner and Shoto would think to himself that, huh, there was one thing he liked about their apartment.
Theirs theirs theirs.
The word for this was tucked safely behind his teeth.