Work Text:
Shouta woke up to the sound of the door and footsteps masking a quiet conversation. The first words he heard were a whispered: “Is Aizawa here?”
It was Tsukauchi, Toshinori’s best friend from the police. Shouta let his eyes drift shut again
“I don’t see his shoes. He might be in his own dorm room or he’s still out,” Toshinori answered.
“I see.”
Tsukauchi made no attempt to keep his voice down now.
Shouta’s shoes were, in fact, in his own dorm room, but he had walked over on socks into Toshinori’s. At some point in this a-year-and-something relationship, he had grown more comfortable with another person leeching his space, warmth and blanket share than he was on his own. Affection did strange things to people.
Since he had developed the ability to sleep through the ruckus of crowded classrooms, public transport and even the odd staff room party, Shouta didn’t feel it necessary to announce his presence. Their conversation in the other room would not keep him awake.
“So you’re really not going to tell him about it? Not even mention it?” Tsukauchi said, to the sound of glass clinking and some liquid being poured.
“It’s not that important.”
“It seems to be important to you.”
“I would only upset things.”
“I don’t know,” Tsukauchi said. “He’s your boyfriend. I think you should be able to talk about things like that.”
Slowly, Shouta opened his eyes again, staring at the light that seeped into the room through the small gap between door and doorway.
“Maybe.” There was a pause, a glass placed on a wooden surface. “Anyway, what where you saying about the Ringo investigation before?”
Tsukauchi chuckled at the obvious diversion.
“Well, Detective Takahashi was going to handle it...”
The conversation pattered on, but Shouta’s sleep-addled brain lost focus as anger bubbled in his chest. What the hell had that been about again? Nevermind, he could imagine. There was only one thing Toshinori tended to lie to him about and it was his health. The big things Shouta would hear about, but not the bad blood test or the spell of nausea that ruined his boyfriend’s day. He could hear Toshinori’s customary answer when found out in his head now: ‘I don’t want you to worry.’
It was annoying enough that he contemplated getting up, but he stopped himself. Toshinori usually wouldn’t have told Tsukauchi, either. He kept these things tightly shut up in his own head. If he had spilled to him, he might be swayed to act like a rational adult by his best friend. He would give Toshinori until tomorrow evening, Shouta decided, to come clean.
-
By dinner the next day, Toshinori had, of course, not talked to him yet and Shouta’s fuse had grown progressively shorter during ten hours of herding what was now the 2 A. Despite being a little older, they were still too deep into puberty to have grown much wiser, and their ever-improving powers just made training more taxing.
After separating Bakugou and Midoriya, fishing Mineta out from under a piece of debris in the simulated disaster city from where he was hoping to get a glimpse under the skirt of a girl from 2 B and making sure Kirishima and Tetsutetsu were as far away from each other as possible all day long, Shouta really wanted to do nothing else but curl up on his couch. However, the conversation he had overheard meant that he would probably get to use his evening trying to coax information out of Toshinori, who had spent the whole dinner talking about school.
After they had left the mess hall and retired to Toshinori’s dorm room, Shouta decided that Toshinori’s time to cough up what he was hiding by himself was up.
“Didn’t you visit Recovery Girl last Monday?” Shouta asked furtively. “You never told me what she said.”
Toshinori was still pulling off his shoes as he looked up.
“Oh, that was just routine,” he answered.
Shouta narrowed his eyes at him as he watched him.
“I’m tired of you,” he muttered.
He felt bad for the words as soon as Toshinori stopped in his movement and stared at him like a deer in the headlights. The long day had put an unnecessary edge into his words that he hadn’t planned. Maybe it wasn’t so bad, though. Emotional extortion usually worked wonders on Toshinori’s will to talk, though Shouta was not merciless enough to make use of that too often.
“What?” Toshinori asked nervously and straightened, approaching Shouta as carefully as one might an angry cat. “What did I do?”
“I heard you talk to Tsukauchi when you came home the other night. I’ve told you a dozen times not to lie about your health. I don’t like repeating myself.”
The only other thing Toshinori often got a bit skittish about was sex and he was not the type to discuss intimacy with a friend – he barely did with Shouta. There was little else they could have been talking about but his illness.
Toshinori looked at him blankly and then finally his face lit up briefly in understanding. He raised his hands.
“No, I promise – it wasn’t about my health. It was about something stupid.”
Shouta pinned him with an unrelenting gaze under which Toshinori fidgeted like an insect held in place by one long, thin leg.
“We were talking about marriage,” he finally admitted.
Shouta opened his mouth and closed it again, knitting his brow.
“Marriage?”
That information came completely out of left field. He tried to squeeze it into the bits of the conversation he had overheard. Something that was important to Toshinori but that he didn’t want to bring up for fear of upsetting things between them… well, he supposed it made sense, but since Toshinori hadn’t ever mentioned a wedding before with one word, it would have been hard to guess.
“His sister just got engaged and I mentioned that when I was a kid, I really wanted to get married young.”
“Why?” Shouta asked.
The white dress dreams seemed more like the stuff little girls were stereotypically interested in.
“I didn’t have much of a home and most of the kids I met had married parents. I guess it’s just what family looked like to me when I was little and it stuck in my mind as something that seems nice. However, that all took a back seat with One for All, of course. Naomasa just asked whether I had considered it again now.”
“And you have,” Shouta completed.
Toshinori cleared his throat, wiping away a speck of blood in the corner of his mouth with his thumb.
“I didn’t want to bring it up at all. We haven’t been together that long and I’m thirteen years older and who knows how long my health will hold up, so obviously I don’t expect anything from you…”
“You want to marry me,” Shouta interrupted him.
Toshinori looked at him like he’d asked a particularly odd question and gave a lopsided smile.
“Of course I do.”
Considering the cold comment Shouta had just flung at him to get this conversation going, he didn’t know if he would have been so ready to agree to holy matrimony in Toshinori’s stead. Then that puzzled ‘of course I do’, like there couldn’t even be another answer – Shouta couldn’t help but admit it was pretty flattering.
“You probably don’t think much of marriage, anyway,” Toshinori guessed.
“No.”
Toshinori knew him well. Shouta had never placed much importance on marriage himself. Considering you could get divorced without being shunned from the village these days, it would really only mean a change on his tax forms. Of course, he also had spent his childhood in a rather ordinary home, in contrast to the journey between uninterested relatives that Toshinori had hinted at a few times, so maybe there was some ground laid in his psyche that freed him from the need of such symbolism. It didn’t mean he didn’t want this relationship to last.
“Well, there you go. It’s not important,” Toshinori said, doing an admirable job of keeping disappointment out of his voice.
“If it means so much to you, we could get married,” Shouta added evenly.
Toshinori stared and then turned away and doubled over and spit blood into the hollow of his hand, which was just the beginning of a pretty thorough coughing fit. At least his reaction was as devoid of romance as his own offer, Shouta thought sardonically while he got a tissue for his boyfriend.
“Do you mean that? But you don’t want to…” Toshinori croaked into the paper when his remaining lung had managed to get hold of some air again.
“To have some signed papers isn’t important to me, but I don’t mind, either. I have no intentions of leaving you anytime soon, so why not?”
“The signed papers might mean a lot to some other people,” Toshinori ventured carefully. “The media would find out.”
“They are bound to do that eventually,” Shouta said with a shrug.
It promised to be a bother, but he found the thought worth it for the incredulous smile Toshinori was giving him.
“So I guess you’re not tired of me after all?” Toshinori asked quietly.
“I was tired of this day and you were in the way,” Shouta admitted. He had also jumped to conclusions which was something he liked to scold Toshinori for. They did say you picked up habits from your partner in a relationship...
Shouta did not like apologising, but maybe he could make up for the way he had snapped at Toshinori anyway. Slowly, he took a step back and went down on one knee. He wasn’t sure how traditional this gesture was without a ring and in his living room next to the basket with dirty laundry, but judging by Toshinori’s rapt expression, he wasn’t too far off the mark.
“I guess if this is a childhood dream, I should do this properly,” he said, brushing some strands of hair out of his face. “Will you marry me?”
“Yes,” Toshinori said, his laughter a little choked.
A second after, Shouta found himself wrapped up in his long arms and lifted not only back onto his feet but then off the ground. Thankfully, his boyfriend lacked the strength to keep him with his toes dangling in the air for too long.
“See, everything is easier when you talk to me,” Shouta noted after he had been deposited on the floor again.
Toshinori just grinned as bright as daylight.
As Shouta watched him prepare tea for them a little later that evening, he considered his long, bony fingers wrapped around a mug and imagined a golden band with their names engraved on the inside around it.
Maybe a little symbolism would not be so bad after all.