Work Text:
“Come here often, handsome?”
Shouta quickly lifts his head up at the sound.
Met not with the sight of Hizashi - his husband, the very man who’d proposed they’d meet up at their usual spot in the first place - but Present Mic, ridiculous hair updo and all, Shouta's usual, reserved smile for one remains nowhere in sight.
“No,” he deadpans.
Mic’s grin falters.
“My husband drags me here a lot,” Shouta continues, yawning. “Haven’t seen him yet, though.”
Sighing, Shouta’s gaze lingers past the borders of his face. Over the expanse of leather and still slicked up (yet gritted with sweat and dirt) hair, running down the other man’s body to meet with the scarlet hue of his belt.
The sheen jet black coat of his leather pants. Shouta’s vision trails even further down to where the man’s boots had clicked unevenly into the restaurant, joining the ringing of the entrance door’s bell.
There’s scuffing on his boots; the type of boots, despite being for work, that Hizashi usually babies too much to let such a thing happen to.
His gaze trails back up. A close call, Shouta thinks, a clenching fury grabbing at his chest. There’s the sudden, slamming knowledge that the directional speaker usually aligning the other’s throat is gone.
“Shouta--”
“But I thought we agreed, Mic,” he cuts in, not for a lack of knowing what to say, but rather the opposite-- the distinct need to inform, to give the know-how, but the tugging annoyance insists that he mustn’t, that there’s a lesson to be learnt here.
He peers over Mic’s throat, again, lingers with blank eyes at the sight of a developing bruise on what Shouta, not Eraserhead, can only recognize to be Hizashi’s collarbone. Watches Mic run the back of his neck with a sheepish expression, recognizes the subtle, static twist of his wrist as it curls over the fallen strands of his blond hair.
Shouta is unable to resist steeling his expression into something soft.
“I thought we agreed that we wouldn’t bring that here,” he continues, hushed, now.
Present Mic and Hizashi laugh. It makes Shouta’s ears and eyes brace for an impact that never arrives, the laughter a clumsy pitch that keens high with quirk-use. In turn, it makes Hizashi recoil with wide eyes and an apologetic look. A hand - ungloved, devoid of his usual black leather rimmed with red at the edges, had he lost it? - settles instinctively over the expanse of bruises, clenched as Shouta’s eyes open wide with Erasure.
He keeps Erasure going for 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
Blink.
Shouta takes a few more seconds to be swallowed in the dark reprieve. Relishes it. He hasn’t used Erasure in a while; not since the other day, for the training exercises with his Class 1-A - the hellion class, he’d note not fondly, why would it be fondly? - and when he’d had to interrogate that arson villain. The one that Tsukauchi’s team had called him to come into the station for.
Work. All of it's work, work, work.
“Your voice sounds like shit,” Shouta grits out, blinking his eyes open. With a sigh, his palms stray away from the cup of coffee he’d been clutching to his chest (a wonder he hadn’t spilled it yet) and rise up to rub at them, then reach down for his utility belt--
Right. He stifles a disbelieving snort, feeling a pang of envy for everyone else that wasn’t him at the present moment. The thought of bringing eyedrops had completely slipped his mind, he realizes, because he hadn’t even brought his utility belt here. He’d dressed up in civvies, and much more nicely than his usual pick of wardrobe.
“Thank ya! Hadn’t noticed,” Mic exclaims cheerfully. The snarky effect is ruined by the static in his voice, the threat of a wheeze, a cough, lingering on the periphery of his vocal cords, and Shouta can only stare unimpressed.
If the look has an effect on Mic, Shouta would be none the wiser, as the man - lovely, despite being as stubborn and reckless as he is - simply ghosts a thumb into the pocket of his leather.
In a flash, he is presented with his saving grace and a jelly packet to boot.
Mic shifts on his feet. Favours his left, leaning toward it. Tilts his head teasingly, blinking back the picture of mock innocence and what Shouta can only recognize to be loving concern and guilt all assuaged into one. “Think you could forgive me?”
He tries not to, at first. It should be easy. Shouta's not a particularly forgiving person by any means, the type to caress grudges better than he can caress an eager body.
But he thinks of caramel coffee. He thinks of lazy mornings curled up on frustratingly soft, memory foam. A protest and a dip in the mattress when the inevitable shriek of one of their alarms comes ringing out into the quiet, apologetic limbs tumbling over sore ones to quell back the loud lull.
He thinks of reruns of shows and rewinding back old pre-runs of radio broadcasts late into the night. Eventful nights split between the stench of iron, antiseptic and adhesive, curled up at the edge of a tub or maybe a stool, just to be safe; uneventful nights, some nights, when sleep morphed into anything but familiar, he'd listen to the hum of a chirping, soothing voice calling out. Much like a lullaby, his husband's voice would lure him towards the realm of sleep and guide his hand in, reaching out.
I could forgive you for anything, Shouta thinks, not pulling back.
“I don’t know,” he raises a brow. Pretends to think on it. The bottle of eyedrops shimmer bright in the dim of the cafe. Hizashi's still staring. “Maybe you should try harder. Try and make it up to me.”
The blond’s lips tremble, then. His wrists fall to his sides.
The air in the room comes to a standstill. The tick of a clock in the foreground (or is it Hizashi’s blasted watch? Had that managed to come out unscathed at all, Shouta wonders), clack of a unblemished metronome become drowning, encompassing in their ears.
It brings Shouta back to the analog metronome they have at home, the beaten-up yet clearly well-loved dinosaur of a tool that Hizashi’s been far too sentimental to ditch; it lays at the edge of their grand piano, peters on a careful balance that never seems to break, no matter how many times he’s ‘had’ to divebomb into the floor to save it. The question of ‘had’, because it’d never fallen, no matter how many ‘close calls’ they’d had time and time again.
He understands the appeal of keeping things until they break. It’s been his motto for as long as he can recall. It’s the most efficient approach to keeping things. Even living with Hizashi now has not eroded him enough to keep more than the bare essentials, though he doesn’t ward off the occasional gift that his husband springs on him.
But Hizashi is not the type to be sentimental for sentimental’s sake; he swerves through life with headlights and not-quite pipedreams. He doesn’t keep things unless they mean something.
He throws away scruffs and scrapes and bitter excuses for Shouta’s uniform as soon as his eyes linger over the damage, despite Shouta’s constant, insistent protest on how it could last just a little longer-- he throws away whatever is not necessary and nothing more.
With the way he treats that metronome, it’s almost strange it hasn’t been hung up and framed in their living room, tucked beside the mock Eraserhead and Present Mic shelves Hizashi insists on calling their ‘merch’ shrines, as laughable as it is.
He’s always reasoned, it can still work, though-- so why change it?
The sounds crescendo to a stop.
Shouta shrugs, leans back into his seat. “Think you can manage that?”
“That,” Hizashi-- Hizashi, this time, Shouta is cognizant of for certain-- finger guns weakly. Green eyes catch with a sudden gleam as he rasps out, “--That I can do, yo."
The eyedrops make it to his eyes faster than he can say fine.