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“That all you got?”
Unimpressed, Shouta stares down at him with the same vigour of a boy in desperate need of a nap.
Ever the unrelenting, Hizashi stares back, even if there is some sympathy to be contrived when his eyes scan over the eyebags not paying rent under Shouta’s eyes -- though it’s not entirely his problem, given that out of the two of them, he’d been the least willing to undergo the extra training.
But Shouta had insisted. Hizashi would be a downright fool to deny anything Shouta insisted.
Plus, it’s not like he doesn’t have time to kill, what with his parents abroad and all, Oboro away for an entire week for whatever personal matters he's up to, and who would he be if not a very eager hero-hopeful?
Shouta sighs. “If you want, we can pick this up tomorrow.”
His eyes widen. “Huh?”
“You look dead on your feet,” Shouta says, almost as if he’s pointing something out and highlighting it in yellow. “And continuing when you’re clearly this distracted would be, simply put, stupid. You’re not even learning anything. We should do this another time.”
Picking this up tomorrow would prove a very loose cannon. Wires crossed and everything.
There’s a huge, fat chance he’d explode from the inside if left on his lonesome today-- and being denied the chance to hang out with Shouta outside of school, even if it does, technically, in a way, loop back to school all over again with the amount of bone-bruising training they’ve been up to lately, makes his stomach churn uncomfortably.
True, it’s only a few missed hours, but…
“I’m learning plenty!” he defends, after a moment.
Shouta studies him.
Miraculously, beyond the clear rush of heat that erupts into his face, he manages to steel himself just enough not to gawk and demand what’s up.
“What?”
Looking through him, dim, nearly jet-black eyes narrow incredulously. “You took 20 seconds to answer that.”
He didn’t know that. “So?”
“So, go figure,” Shouta grumbles. “Go home, Yamada.”
“Only if you come with me,” he finds himself saying, like an idiot.
An uncomfortable, unholy amount of time passes, stale water sloshing in a broken filter, mold collecting in the corners, before Hizashi’s brain catches up to him.
He laughs. “Um.”
“Um?”
“Sorry,” he blurts out, hand rubbing the nape of his neck. A slight wince leaves him at the brush of contact with what must be a bruise. Leave it to Aizawa Shouta, Gen Student turned Hero-Extraordinaire to turn a new leaf twice-over and marvel him all over again. If his unofficial counter is right, he’d tallied up twenty new bruises this month alone within the first week. “Just ignore me, man, I say crazy stuff sometimes, y’know? I was just riffing. Don’t mind me.”
They’re not even in given-name territory yet. The only time he’d used ‘Shouta’ anywhere else but the tightest confines of his head had been just to test the waters, and never spoken about again after he’d seen Shouta’s face flush, seemingly mortified -- Hizashi had been bowled over by the look alone, just enough for him to decide he’d bide his time instead. Or wait forever. Whatever option suited Shouta best.
Working up the nerve for testing out a name had taken weeks of careful deliberation, which would, in any other case, be downright baffling for Hizashi, who tended to take emotional things at face value from the get-go and think later. How could he even ask for him to--
“Okay.”
On his best days, Hizashi would consider his brain a collection of action-filled channels, primed with the latest thoughts and tabs and biased new anchors. Today, there’s an idle channel he involuntarily flicks to-- just in time for the DVD logo to glide across the display, and bounce off the corner in its best efforts to confuse him. “Huh?”
Shouta shrugs his shoulders. “Okay. Let’s go to your place, then.”
His friend’s black hair swooshes against the rhythm of the wind, bangs rippling against the obscured outlines of his nose. Facing away from Hizashi just enough to overshadow the outstretched hand.
“Really?” He blinks. “You wanna?”
Great going, Hizashi, real eloquent. Next you’ll tell him you want to take him out on a date to the nursery.
“No, Yamada, I’m saying ‘let’s go’ because I clearly don’t want to,” the other huffs, hand shaking impatiently before wrapping around Hizashi’s wrist. “Why else?”
The warmth of callouses around his wrist and grip just hard enough to likely leave indents afterwards, yet still gentle enough to make Hizashi swoon as he’s ushered to his feet, there’s only a moment before he’s vertical once more, still stumbling for a response.
“I don’t know,” he answers eventually. “You’re very hard to read, y’know.”
Yet Aizawa Shouta remains a perfectly written book. An edition he finds himself turning to in the library, hands scrambling to turn a page, skimming his fingers over the text and lingering just long enough to leave traces of his print between the lines, a novel whose hand-in-by-date slips his mind on a constant basis, like a 9-5 job he would've surely turned to had he not made the blissful, grand decision to go to UA.
Hadn't met Oboro, his best friend, and Shouta, the other, who's--
Who's currently staring at him as if he's crazy. "Okay, let's go blow this joint," Hizashi mumbles out, laughing.