IG : zaraf.lol
☾⋆｡𖦹°✩ luffy wants me. the government says otherwise.☾⋆｡𖦹°✩ zaraf • xxiii ⋆୨♡୧⋆anime boys ruined my standards⋆୨♡୧⋆ ...requests are open...
my requests are officially open for one piece fluff!! ☁️🏴☠️
if you've been reading a soft, comforting, domestic, or just tooth-rotting sweet fic with your favorite Haikyuu characters, now's your chance! send me your ideas, tropes, or specific scenarios for ONE PIECE and i'll pick the ones that inspire me most.
♡ x reader only
♡ fluff-focused (comfort, romance, slice of life, etc.)
♡ feel free to be as specific or as unhinged as you want with your prompts!
pairing — f!reader x iwaizumi hajime (post timeskip)
tags! — modern au, BLENDED smau, post timeskip au, fluff, slowburn-ish, angst/comfort, crack, second chance, exes to lovers, older brother’s best friend, might be ooc, mentions of alcohol, intoxication, smoking, swearing, hookups (nothing explicit), divorce, panic & anxiety attacks, overthinking, occasional questionable humour, fencer!reader, reader is oikawa’s younger sister, kys jokes, sexual jokes, mentions of having anxiety, anxiety medication [will update if there’s more]
status — discontinued
sypnosis — you don’t care about the messy breakup that happened in high school with your older brother’s best friend, he doesn’t bother you anymore, you think— especially not after years of no contact with him. all you care about is your sport; fencing. you’ve just been selected to represent japan for the olympics in your final year of university, and you couldn’t have been more excited at the opportunity. there’s just one slight problem though— the athletic trainer just so happens to be your said ex boyfriend.
she's always looking for new art. he's sending her pictures of romantic street art he finds in cities on away games. they say if you fall in love with an artist, you'll be in their art forever. she's the inspiration behind the love notes he's leaving on walls and sending her pictures of as if he's just stumbled upon them. he's the one she's thinking about everytime she's behind a camera.
suna x f! reader
COMPLETED haikyuu smau
taglist: CLOSED
playlists: 1 ( made by me </3 ) | 2 ( @eggyrocks's SUPERIOR playlist )
warnings & notes: language, alcohol/drinking, lots of written parts probably, extreme extreme pining, boths sides are in denial about how the other party feels about them, college timeskip, msby is a college volleyball team bc i said so and the team is slightly altered, timestamps don't matter, hurt & comfort having to do with family issues, comfort comes from found family <3, suna is a loverboy, miscommunication, friends to lovers, everyone's probably ooc. you can blame the horrors of my past relationships and zodiac sign. i know very little about photography and graffiti but i'm trying my best
THE EXHIBITS: coffee enthusiasts | ride or die bros for life
table of contents: (💌 for any chapters with written content <3)
part one: i know a guy (💌)
part two: backstabbing bitch
part three: rinnie poo (💌)
part four: the "i'm disappointed" card
part five: fire extinguisher man
part six: rowdy teenagers (💌)
part seven: there's life in these walls (💌)
part eight: if you're willing to listen (💌)
part nine: for as long as you'll have me (💌)
part ten: connected the dots
part eleven: would you light a building on fire for her?
part twelve: support small businesses day
part thirteen: big spoon deity
part fourteen: one step forward, two steps back (💌)
part fifteen: middle school boys locker room core
part sixteen: remember in the morning (💌)
part seventeen: sorry omi / the incident (💌)
part eighteen: making mac and cheese at two in the morning? (💌)
part nineteen: unspoken confessions (💌)
part twenty: epilogue (💌)
moodboards: love notes, suna, y/n, suna & y/n
extras: kenma photography refs, suna & y/n sending each other tiktoks hc
Summary: Everyone aboard the Polar Tang knows you draw. Landscapes. Islands. The crew. But after all, every artist has a favorite subject. Law certainly doesn’t have a clue… until one forgotten sketchbook changes everything.
A\N: I loved writing this!! 🥹 Thank you so much for the request, I hope I did it justice and that you enjoy it. Lyyy
Word count: about 6.3k
Contains: artist!reader, friends to lovers, established relationship, domestic fluff, mutual pining, slow burn, Law being the prettiest muse imaginable, anatomy references, crew shenanigans, very lovesick Law.
Warnings: fem!reader, use of y/n a few times, reader draws Law shirtless for anatomy studies (non-explicit), mentions of tattoos, lots of fluff.
From the occasional oil painting to the countless sketches and drawings chronicling your adventures, the Heart Pirates had always known you were the artistic sort.
It had been your combat skills that first caught the captain’s attention and earned you an invitation to join the crew, yet it didn’t take long aboard the Polar Tang for everyone to discover that your talents extended far beyond the battlefield, reaching into all manner of creative pursuits.
More often than not, your drawings had a documentary quality to them, quiet observational pieces you worked on whenever you found a spare moment between steering the submarine, carrying out missions, or exploring the countless islands you visited.
Your sketchbook was practically an extension of yourself, tucked beneath your arm wherever you went, ready to preserve whichever moments happened to strike you as the most charming or interesting.
Within the quiet comfort of life aboard the submarine, away from responsibilities, you immortalized little moments for yourself.
Bepo laughing so hard he could barely catch his breath. Penguin and Shachi bickering over something neither of them would remember five minutes later. Law reading. Shachi asleep with a book draped across his face. Law nursing yet another cup of coffee. Ikkaku playing cards with Jean Bart. Law performing surgery. Bepo napping on the deck. Law fighting to keep his sleepy head from dropping onto his desk.
You had even drawn the Polar Tang itself from nearly every conceivable angle.
Looking back, you probably should have noticed just how often one particular man in a spotted hat kept finding his way onto those pages.
You never did.
It simply seemed natural that he would be there, considering he was the person you spent the most time with, constantly helping him organize paperwork in his office.
Even then, your drawings had been beautiful, but there was a certain distance to them. You simply captured the scenes unfolding before your eyes, nothing more. Everyone knew that.
Sometimes the captain would even ask whether you had finished a particular sketch, taking it into his hands and studying every detail despite how embarrassingly self-conscious it made you to have him inspect your work so carefully.
As time passed, though you never consciously noticed it yourself, he began appearing more and more often.
Then again, why wouldn’t he? The two of you spent so much time together that his presence had quietly become part of your everyday life. No matter where you went, he somehow ended up there too.
Even if you stumbled upon a vast meadow bursting with wildflowers on some distant island and wandered off to paint it in peaceful solitude, your grumpy doctor of a captain would inevitably appear not long afterward, muttering that he failed to understand what was supposedly so fascinating about flowers in the first place.
“Spring is coming. I feel sorry for those who don’t think that’s important…”
He would roll his eyes, mumbling something about you being far too much of a romantic, yet settle down beside you anyway, quietly watching you work.
You really did have perfectly reasonable explanations for your drawings. Honest.
Whenever you decided to practice drawing hands, you somehow ended up filling half a sketchbook with studies of Law’s from every possible angle and position.
“He’s got the most defined bones out of everyone,” you would explain. “Besides, the tattoos create great shadows.”
If your sketchbook happened to contain studies of his hoodie or his hat, it was only because you were practicing different fabric textures.
Obviously.
And if you happened to be studying facial expressions, then of course it only made sense to have half a dozen sketches of him frowning over paperwork, followed by another ten or so of him smiling faintly while reading one of his comics from various positions.
Everything was perfectly logical.
Perfectly easy to explain.
Which was precisely why Bepo’s reaction made so little sense one afternoon as the two of you lounged around together while he absentmindedly flipped through one of your filled sketchbooks.
“There’s… a lot of Captain in here,” he observed.
You merely shrugged, taking another sip of your coffee.
“There’s everyone.”
He turned another page.
“He’s in this one too… And here… This one’s him as well.”
“Coincidence,” you replied, dunking a biscuit into your coffee. “I draw everyone. We probably just spent more time together that day, so I ended up sketching him a little more.”
The polar bear said nothing.
Silently, he counted thirty-two drawings of Law…
…and two of Penguin.
You only began questioning the state of your own emotions when you noticed that one of your sketchbooks was nearly full, yet didn’t contain a single drawing of anyone else from the crew.
There were still the usual everyday sketches of Law scattered throughout its pages, of course, but now they were joined by an ever-growing collection dedicated almost entirely to his tattoos.
Heat spread across your cheeks at the mere thought of wanting a better look at them. Up close. Close enough to faithfully capture every intricate line, even the ones hidden beneath his clothes.
Somewhere along the way, you’d forgotten that those pages had originally begun as anatomy studies.
Now they were filled with careful observations of the muscles in his arms and chest, how each tattoo stretched and shifted ever so slightly as he moved.
You had even asked him not to move once while trying to capture a particular angle.
“Hold still.”
Law didn’t so much as glance up from the medical journal in his hands.
“…Why?”
“Your forearm tattoo curves weirdly when you rotate your wrist.”
Too absorbed in his reading to question it, he simply extended his arm toward you without another word, letting you do… whatever it was you were doing.
It wasn’t until nearly ten minutes later that he realized you’d been staring at him the entire time.
Your mind drifted back to all the afternoons spent watching him from the opposite side of the office, your heart racing as you quietly melted at the sight of him getting irritated over paperwork that refused to add up.
Without realizing it, you had filled pages with sketches of his furrowed brows, his slightly pursed lips, the faint puff of his cheeks whenever he grew annoyed, somehow ending up with eleven different versions of that expression alone.
Then there were the shadows his eyelashes cast across his cheeks.
The subtle curve of his lips whenever a smile escaped him.
His eyes.
His eyes in every imaginable expression: irritation, concentration, curiosity, happiness.
Oh God.
I’m in love with our grumpy captain.
The doctor of the Heart Pirates found himself increasingly confused by your recent behavior.
He would never admit it aloud, but he was worried.
For the past several days, although you still spent your usual hours working beside him in the office, you had begun avoiding him whenever you could.
You still sorted mountains of paperwork as diligently as ever, only now you always wore your headphones, leaving little room for conversation. Whenever he asked you something, you’d slip one earbud out just long enough to answer before immediately putting it back in. Sometimes you didn’t even hear him the first time.
He never commented on it.
Everyone had days when silence was preferable to the noise of other people.
God knew he had more of those than anyone.
Still, your company had always been one of the few he genuinely enjoyed, and he couldn’t shake the quiet hope that perhaps tomorrow you’d be a little more willing to talk to him again.
It felt strange in other ways too.
Whenever he found enough free time to join the crew for an evening card game, you were no longer sitting beside him as his partner.
Instead of exchanging knowing smiles and whispering advice over your next move, you now found yourself across the table beside Shachi, laughing every time he stubbornly ignored your suggestions and confidently played exactly the wrong card.
A faint pang of jealousy, one he would sooner die than acknowledge, settled somewhere deep inside his chest as he caught himself glancing in your direction throughout the evening.
Across the table, Bepo seemed equally distracted, nervously darting his gaze between the two of you while absentmindedly throwing random cards onto the pile.
Law had always claimed he enjoyed card games.
The truth was, his favorite part had never been the cards.
It had simply been sitting beside you.
Faced with the alternative, he couldn’t help but admit to himself that he would’ve rather skipped the game altogether.
The following afternoon, after excusing yourself from the office for half an hour to go listen to Penguin’s newest collection of music he’d picked up on the last island, the submarine’s brooding captain remained behind to finish his paperwork.
Or rather…
He sat with his pen hovering uselessly above the page, wondering whether he’d done something over the past few days to upset you.
Perhaps he’d been too cold.
Perhaps you’d finally grown tired of trying to get through to him and decided the more entertaining members of the crew were simply better company.
Regret quietly settled over him. He should’ve asked you to go somewhere together on the next island. Just the two of you.
Now charismatic Penguin had probably charmed you with his music collection…
…and who knew when you’d come back to him…
His spiraling thoughts were interrupted by an unusually cheerful polar bear entering the office with a steaming cup of green tea.
“Captain, where’s Y/N?”
“What does that have to do with me?” Law answered with mild irritation. “She can spend her time however she wants.”
After a brief pause, he muttered,
“As long as she gets back soon enough to finish this documentation, she can spend time with whoever she wants for as long as she wants.”
Bepo pretended not to hear the second half.
Still smiling to himself, he set the cup beside Law, who acknowledged it with a quiet nod of thanks.
“Hmm… Y/N really is a wonderful artist, isn’t she?”
Silence.
“As you know… she draws everyone on the crew.”
“Hm.”
“You have the most pages, though.”
“…What?”
“Not fair,” Bepo chuckled as he walked out of the office. “You’re one lucky guy.”
He left behind one thoroughly bewildered captain.
Later that day, the two of you were updating the submarine’s library. Law stood atop a ladder placing the newly acquired books onto the shelves while you handed them up one by one, carefully recording each addition.
Every so often your fingers brushed against his.
Each fleeting touch sent an unwelcome current racing through both of you, one you silently agreed to ignore. You’d pretend to examine the bookshelves with great interest while embarrassment painted your cheeks, and the tips of his ears.
This angle is really not helping my increasingly ridiculous crush, you thought, looking up at your captain from almost directly below.
From there, the sharp line of his nose seemed even more striking, and you found yourself watching the slow rise and fall of his long eyelashes.
Ridiculous.
Ridiculous.
The word echoed through your mind later as well while the two of you worked in companionable silence, cataloguing documents together.
It echoed again as your pencil unconsciously recreated those same thick eyelashes arching above serious golden eyes.
Then the tattooed heart with the smiling Jolly Roger emblazoned across his chest.
You jolted when you heard your captain calling your name, snapping your sketchbook shut almost instantly.
“Could you take these books back to the office?” he asked. “We’ll go through them properly tomorrow. Keep two or three with you and leave the rest on my desk. Then head to dinner. I’ll join you once I’m finished here.”
Still distracted, you nodded, gathering the towering stack of books into your arms.
The pile was so high you had to steady it with your chin to stop it from collapsing like a house of cards, a sight that made an unexpected wave of fondness wash over Law.
In your haste, however, you failed to notice that your sketchbook, buried beneath the stack, had slipped free and remained behind on the table as you left the library.
Once he’d finished highlighting the necessary information and sorting tomorrow’s paperwork into neat piles, Law finally prepared to head for the dining hall.
That’s when he noticed something lying on the table where you’d been sitting.
Of course.
You’d forgotten something.
He walked over and picked up the light-colored sketchbook, intending to return it the next time he saw you.
Still…
Curiosity quietly tugged at him.
Just one look.
He opened it.
A drawing of himself.
He turned the page.
Another one.
He flipped to the middle at random.
Him again.
Another page.
A detailed anatomical study of muscles.
He flipped toward the back.
A meticulous rendering of his hands.
…What the hell?
He stood there staring at the sketchbook in complete silence, so stunned that his thoughts seemed to short-circuit altogether.
More than embarrassed, he was simply… astonished.
Not because someone had documented him in such painstaking detail.
But because you had.
And not because he was the captain.
Simply because he was him.
After everyone had finished dinner, full and ready to retreat for the night before another day awaited them, Law quietly asked you to stay behind.
“I think you forgot this,” he said, a faint smirk tugging at the corner of his lips.
If the earth had opened beneath your feet and swallowed you into its deepest depths, straight to the bottom of the Grand Line, you wouldn’t have protested.
You felt like you were dying.
Before you could snatch the sketchbook from his hands, he deliberately opened it to one of the more detailed portraits, the kind that made it painfully obvious you’d spent hours bringing it to life.
“You spent that much time on this?”
“…Maybe.”
Silence settled between you, and for the life of you, you couldn’t decipher what was passing behind those amber eyes.
“You got the eyes wrong.”
That…
That was not what you’d expected him to say.
“What?”
“They aren’t always that harsh. Or that distant.” His gaze lingered on the drawing for another moment. “They’re softer. Especially depending on who’s standing in front of me.”
He tried to sound casual, though the warmth creeping into his cheeks betrayed him far more effectively than his voice ever could. It was, whether he intended it or not, a confession.
“You’ll have to take another look from up close,” he continued, gently placing the sketchbook back into your hands. “You can fix it tomorrow, when we visit the next island.”
With that, he turned toward the door, wished you goodnight with the smallest of smiles, and left.
Your heart threatened to leap straight out of your chest and join the rest of his collection.
Not that you would’ve minded.
And that…
That was how it all began.
By the time the two of you were together, the quiet blooming of your relationship could be traced through your sketches alone.
Little by little, they transformed into increasingly intimate moments, the sort only someone who shared another person’s quietest hours would ever have the chance to witness.
Law lying in bed, still wearing his glasses as he read.
Law fast asleep with his head thrown back, mouth slightly open, snoring without the slightest hint of dignity.
Law first thing in the morning, hair hopelessly disheveled, not quite awake yet.
A cup of coffee slowly growing cold beside him.
Law laughing so hard he doubled over.
His head resting in your lap while insisting he was only “resting his eyes.”
Whenever his gaze happened to fall upon one of those sketches, an unfamiliar feeling quietly settled inside him.
He had expected studies.
Those had never embarrassed him. To your pencil, he’d simply been another subject worthy of observation. A body was a body, and as a doctor, he understood the fascination that came with studying the way muscles shifted beneath skin or bones dictated movement. Those were the kinds of drawings an artist made when captivated by form.
But these…
These were something else.
They reached far beyond anatomy, and that singular way you saw him unsettled him in a manner he couldn’t begin to explain.
This wasn’t merely what he looked like.
It was what you had chosen to see.
Not the captain.
Not the Surgeon of Death.
Not the man whose name people spoke in hushed voices.
Your gifted hands had filled page after page with the version of him that existed only in the quiet spaces between responsibilities, in fleeting moments rarely witnessed by anyone else.
As though those ordinary, forgettable fragments of his life possessed a beauty he had never once thought to assign them. As though simply existing beside him had been enough to make them worth remembering.
Much like every moment he spent beside you had become filled with countless little memories he knew he would carry with him for the rest of his life.
He hadn’t even realized you had been watching during those moments of quiet contentment. He’d always assumed those tiny glimpses, the rare instances when he allowed himself to truly relax, belonged to him alone. They were the sort of moments no one else would notice, let alone consider meaningful.
And yet…
There they were.
Preserved with the same tenderness another person might reserve for sunsets or constellations.
His breath caught.
The feeling blooming inside his chest was unlike anything he had ever known, something impossibly gentle brushing against his heart, as though wings had suddenly begun to unfurl from it, eager to lift it free and carry it out into the open air.
As your relationship settled into something comfortably familiar, Law gradually became the most frequent subject of your artwork, much to the dismay of certain rather jealous members of the crew, who weren’t above voicing their complaints every now and then.
“There has to be something of me in here somewhere,” Penguin muttered as he flipped through your sketchbook. “Captain… no, Law… Captain again… Captain… Ca… AAAH!”
He yelped, dropping the sketchbook in sheer panic.
It never reached the floor.
An already irritated Law caught it with one hand before it could even come close.
“Be careful.”
“I CAN’T BE CALM WHEN I JUST ACCIDENTALLY SAW TWELVE DRAWINGS OF YOUR ABS, CAPTAIN!” Penguin cried, his face turning scarlet.
He immediately yanked the brim of his hat down over his eyes as though it might erase the memory.
“I can’t believe you never drew the time I absolutely demolished that guy!” he continued dramatically. “It was legendary! A once-in-a-lifetime moment! But no! Apparently all you ever feel like immortalizing are this Surgeon of Death’s hands and ridiculously thick eyelashes.”
He stared at Law in theatrical disbelief.
“…Who knows what else I would’ve found if I’d kept turning the pages.”
Now it was your turn to blush.
“Penguin, no… I’ll draw you soon, it’s not like there’s any—”
“That’s none of your concern,” Law interrupted flatly, still holding the sketchbook securely against his chest.
“She can sketch whatever she wants.”
His golden eyes shifted toward Penguin.
“And if you’re ever that careless with her artwork again…”
A brief pause.
“…we’ll have a conversation in my office.”
Penguin visibly paled.
“…You know what? I suddenly feel very well represented already.”
Even your anatomy studies had grown more detailed.
More intimate.
By then, you could shamelessly ask him to stay perfectly still for ten minutes so you could capture the angle of the tattoo stretching across his chest. The easiest position usually involved you reclining halfway against his lap so that his torso angled ever so slightly toward you, allowing every contour of his chest, abdomen, and arms to reveal itself beneath shifting light. Every muscle found its place upon the page, every subtle ridge and hollow observed with painstaking care.
“Don’t move.”
“I’m not moving.”
“…Your breathing counts.”
He sighed.
“That also counts.”
You frowned at the page, erasing another line.
“Something’s wrong…”
Law leaned forward just enough to glance at your sketch.
“You’ve pulled the pectoralis major too far toward the sternum.”
You looked up at him.
“…Do you enjoy ruining my confidence?”
“No.”
“Could’ve fooled me.”
“I enjoy preventing anatomical inaccuracies.”
“…That’s somehow worse.”
The corner of his mouth twitched.
“Your tattoo work is flawless,” he said, his eyes returning to the page. “It’s just the muscle beneath it.”
“…You couldn’t have started with that?”
“You would’ve stopped listening.”
Sometimes you drew him while he was occupied with something else, and other times, simply because those quiet moments together filled you with such contentment, you found yourself sketching those beloved muscles and bones entirely from memory.
One evening, the two of you sat close together as Law leafed through a medical textbook while you frowned at a sketch of his back, trying to make sense of the broad planes shifting beneath his skin.
So absorbed were you in your work that you never noticed him leaning over your shoulder.
“The trapezius overlaps the latissimus dorsi more than that.”
You looked at him blankly.
“…Do you ever say upper back like a normal person?”
“No.”
Having long since accepted that you would never possess his encyclopedic knowledge of osteology and myology, you had resigned yourself to spending the rest of your life with one impossibly adorable, hopelessly pedantic doctor who insisted on correcting you every chance he got.
“You’re looking at the tendon, not the muscle.”
“Law.”
“Hm?”
“I’m going to need you to use words normal people actually know.”
He sighed, as though you had just asked the impossible.
“…The stringy bit.”
Laughter burst from you before you could stop it.
“See? You can do it.”
“That’s the flexor digitorum profundus,” he informed you knowingly.
“…Mhm.”
“You have no idea what I just said.”
“Not a clue.”
“You’re pretending to understand,” he accused, already preparing an impromptu lecture.
“I love listening to you talk.”
He froze and blinked twice.
The tips of his ears bloomed a brilliant shade of pink as something entirely incoherent escaped beneath his breath, quiet enough that you couldn’t make out the words, though they still managed to tickle something warm inside your chest.
“You sound cute when you get all professor-like.”
Watching your normally composed, reserved boyfriend become so hopelessly flustered filled you with entirely unreasonable satisfaction.
I could get used to endless medical lectures if teasing him always earns me this reaction.
After months of constant reminders about proper anatomical terminology and what felt like several medical lectures every month, though you would never admit just how much you’d secretly enjoyed them, you gradually found yourself using words that had once sounded like an entirely foreign language.
There was something undeniably attractive about having such an absurdly brilliant and beautiful boyfriend all to yourself.
The first time Law had enthusiastically begun explaining the intricacies of the human neck and casually mentioned the sternocleidomastoid, your instinctive response had been to blink at him and mutter, “Bless you.”
Now, whenever he gently corrected your drawings with the same term, you simply nodded.
“I know, I know.”
Without even looking up, you adjusted the line.
“It attaches to the mastoid process, and mine’s too straight.”
Law slowly looked up from his book.
“…I’m proud of you.”
You stared.
“…Was that a compliment?”
“I’ve given you several.”
“You’ve given me homework.”
You teased him, fully aware that countless more assignments would follow, each one secretly becoming your favorite. Every now and then he’d even reinforce those lessons in practice, tracing surprisingly gentle kisses along your neck as he pointed out precisely where each muscle and delicate bone lay beneath your skin.
You had barely blocked in the basic shapes before a familiar voice drifted over your shoulder.
“You’ve exaggerated the deltoid.”
Law had been quietly watching you work for quite some time, long enough that, for once, you had begun to believe he’d found nothing to correct.
Alas…
It had simply been too good to be true.
Without even turning around, you let out an exaggerated sigh.
“There he is.”
“What?”
“My insufferable anatomist. I was wondering how long you’d last before correcting me.”
“I lasted twelve minutes.”
“That’s a personal record.”
A quiet hum escaped him.
Almost a laugh.
“I was trying to let you finish.”
“You failed.”
He rolled his eyes, muttering beneath his breath.
“I’m only trying to help.”
You smiled despite his incurable inability to leave your drawings alone.
“I know.”
Your voice softened.
“You always do.”
Something shifted behind his eyes.
“I know how seriously you take your work.”
His voice had grown quieter now.
“I want your references to be as accurate as they deserve.”
He hesitated before adding,
“…I’ll survive even if that means you’ll keep calling me insufferable.”
He leaned forward just enough to study the page more closely, one finger hovering above the paper without touching it. He knew better than to smudge charcoal.
“The contour’s right,” he said after a moment. “It’s just the insertion that’s slightly off.”
A brief silence followed.
“…The shading’s beautiful, though.”
You blinked.
“You noticed the shading?”
“I notice everything.”
There was an almost bashful quality to his voice now.
“I’ve known you long enough to learn a thing or two myself.”
He cleared his throat.
“…Though you should still fix the deltoid. It’s exaggerated.”
“No. I made you look stronger.”
“I don’t need artistic charity.”
“No?”
“No.”
You erased the line with theatrical reluctance, grumbling under your breath.
“It looked good.”
“It looked inaccurate.”
“It looked handsome.”
The faintest blush dusted the tips of his ears.
“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
More often than not, Law would catch himself watching your hand move across the page, your pencil gliding with practiced confidence as it gathered fragments of him into graceful lines.
The feeling it stirred inside him remained wonderfully unfamiliar, equal parts strange and intimately warm. Somehow, in your drawings, he always appeared calmer than he’d imagined himself to be, softer around the edges, and with time he came to realize that the version of himself reflected through your eyes was the one he preferred above all others. It was the man he wished to be when you looked at him.
And perhaps that was why he found himself hoping you would never stop observing him with those endlessly hopeful eyes that seemed to hold love in every blink.
With all of that in mind, it wasn’t long before Law noticed something else.
In every drawing of the crew, whether they were gathered around the dinner table, celebrating at a festival, pelting one another with snowballs, or simply spending a quiet evening together in the lounge, one person was always missing.
You.
Not just from that sketchbook, but from every sketchbook he’d ever seen.
At most, a hand would occasionally appear, or perhaps a glimpse of your legs stretched across his lap in one of the quieter sketches of the two of you together, but you were never there as part of the crew.
He didn’t ask you about it immediately.
Instead, he continued to watch in silence, patiently waiting until the right moment presented itself.
It came while you were sketching Shachi’s birthday celebration.
Everyone was there.
Penguin and the birthday boy laughing as they clapped each other on the back.
Ikkaku and Jean Bart raising their glasses in a toast.
Bepo sprawled comfortably across the couch beside what had to be his fourth slice of cake, absentmindedly rubbing his contentedly full stomach.
The captain of the Heart Pirates sat at the far end of the sofa, wearing the faintest smile as he spoke with someone outside the frame.
The only indication of that unseen person was a pair of legs draped lazily across his lap.
“Why aren’t you ever in these?”
The question escaped him before he could stop himself.
You blinked, lowering your eyes to the drawing once again.
“What?”
“You draw every member of the crew.”
“…Yeah?”
“Except yourself.”
Your expression turned genuinely puzzled, tinged with a hint of embarrassment.
“I don’t know.”
“You’ve never wondered why?”
“I guess… it just feels… strange.”
You hesitated, searching for the words.
“I can see all of you. I know your faces, the way you move, the energy each of you carries. But I don’t know how I’d even draw myself. It feels awkward.”
A sheepish smile tugged at your lips.
“And I’d probably ruin the whole picture.”
“Hm.”
Law understood that feeling better than most.
The quiet estrangement of looking at yourself and finding a stranger where you ought to have felt at home. He had spent years treating his own body as little more than a vessel for a mind that never quite seemed to belong inside it, as though the two merely happened to coexist rather than truly belong to one another.
So he carried your confession with him long after the conversation had ended, already wondering how he might one day convince you to see yourself with the same tenderness you so effortlessly gave everyone else.
It had been the end of one of those wonderfully uneventful days, the kind that settled over the submarine just before setting sail from another island the following morning.
The two of you had spent the evening tucked away in your room, reading, dozing, and quietly enjoying one another’s company.
Your head rested comfortably in his lap, your eyes closed in contentment as the long, deft fingers of one hand lazily combed through your hair, gently scratching your scalp. With the other, he absentmindedly flipped through the latest pages of your sketchbook.
More than once, his eyes lingered over the confident strokes of your pencil, quietly admiring the remarkable skill behind them. It filled him with a strange sense of pride to know that the same hands capable of holding their own in brutal pirate battles could also create something so delicate, so patient, so impossibly beautiful.
Then his breathing caught.
He had reached another sketch of himself.
He was lying curled against you, his head resting on your shoulder, lips slightly parted in deep, peaceful sleep while the brim of his hat had slipped low enough to shade his eyes.
Of you, only fragments remained.
The curve of a shoulder.
A curtain of hair cascading over it.
The soft folds of your sweater.
He noticed immediately that the drawing hadn’t been finished. The shading remained incomplete, certain details lacked the refinement so characteristic of your work.
Had you been fully awake, you probably never would’ve let him see something unfinished.
But that wasn’t what held his attention.
Near the bottom of the page, written in your careful handwriting so small it might easily have gone unnoticed, were three simple words.
My favorite view.
It was almost unbelievable that three ordinary words could settle so deeply beneath his ribs, finding a place he had long believed incapable of holding this kind of warmth.
As though, without ever searching for it, he had stumbled upon the final dream his soul had been quietly waiting for all along.
It wasn’t the sketch itself that moved him.
It was the realization that someone had looked upon one of his most unguarded, most ordinary moments and found it worthy of preserving.
Worthy of calling beautiful.
Worthy of returning to again and again.
For as long as he could remember, Law had believed love always demanded something in return. That it had to be earned, repaid, or would inevitably be lost.
And yet, within every careful line you had drawn and every shadow you had patiently built, there had been nothing except a quiet admiration for the man he was when he wasn’t trying to be anything more than himself.
For the first time in his life, it occurred to him that perhaps it truly was possible to be loved not for what you chose to show the world, nor in spite of everything you carried within you…
…but simply for who you were.
Perhaps…
Perhaps this was happiness.
Not the loud, fleeting kind he’d always assumed belonged to somebody else, but the quiet sort that slipped beneath your skin unnoticed until, before you realized it, all you wanted was for the moment to linger a little longer.
He didn’t know how to put any of it into words.
Instead, his fingertips drifted slowly across the paper, careful enough that one might have thought he feared smudging the graphite with a single careless touch. He traced those lines for longer than he needed to before gently closing the sketchbook.
Then he drew you closer.
Burying his face in your hair as though it were the safest place in the world, he pressed countless quiet kisses against your forehead and the crown of your head, holding you with a tenderness that said everything he could not.
Basking beneath the golden light of the setting sun in a meadow on the newest island you’d docked at, you and Law had quietly slipped away from the rest of the crew, content to spend the afternoon wrapped up in one another.
Reclining in the grass, you watched clouds drift lazily overhead, you pointing out the shapes they formed while your ever-skeptical boyfriend dismissed each one with an amused scoff, the two of you talking about nothing in particular.
After a while, Law reached into the backpack he’d thoughtfully brought along for your little excursion away from the submarine and pulled something out.
It was the sketchbook you’d been searching for days, the one you’d eventually given up on finding and replaced with a new one before you had the chance to finish it.
“Where did you find it?” you asked, eyes widening as you instinctively reached for it.
Instead of handing it over, Law shifted a little closer, gently guiding you back until you were sitting comfortably between his legs. Then he opened the sketchbook to its final pages.
There, spread across a single sheet, was someone who looked remarkably like you.
You were lying on your stomach atop the bed, surrounded by towering piles of books. The books themselves had been drawn with stiff, ruler-straight lines, yet each one had been filled with painstaking, almost childlike details, right down to your favorite titles and editions. You rested against the fluffy white blanket he’d done his earnest best to capture, your hair spilling loosely around you in delightfully unruly strands, your smile warm and just a little crooked, every tooth nearly the same size. He had even attempted shading, and truthfully, it wasn’t bad at all.
Ever the meticulous man, the Captain of the Heart Pirates had even placed his familiar spotted hat beside you at the corner of the bed.
You stared at the page, speechless, as warmth stung unexpectedly behind your eyes.
“…There was one person missing,” he murmured, rubbing the back of his neck. “I may not be very good at this, but…”
He never got to finish.
You threw your arms around him so suddenly that you nearly knocked him onto his back.
He let out a quiet, startled, “Mm…”
“It’s beautiful! Thank you so much,” you said, your voice thick with emotion as you peppered his cheeks and the corner of his lips with grateful kisses, leaving him blushing a deep shade of red. “You’re actually not bad at this. We might have to become colleagues.”
A quiet laugh escaped through his nose.
“Yeah, right,” he scoffed.
“It’s perfect.”
“It objectively isn’t.”
“It is.”
“The perspective’s wrong.”
“I don’t care.”
“My line weight is inconsistent.”
“I don’t care.”
“The left eye…”
You kissed him again, effectively silencing yet another critique before it had the chance to escape.
You couldn’t help imagining him, a man who had never been blessed with an artist’s hand, sitting down with nothing more than a pencil anyway, enduring every crooked line and every failed attempt simply because, somewhere along the way, he’d decided you deserved to be seen. To be remembered. To see yourself through his eyes.
No one had ever loved you so deliberately.
And in that moment, you silently promised yourself that you would never let that happiness slip away from your heart.
It was well past midnight by the time you began teaching him how to draw hands.
You gently turned his wrist.
“Loosen your grip on the pencil.”
“Like this?”
“A little.”
You nudged his fingers into place.
“You’re holding it like you’re about to perform surgery.”
“…Old habits.”
As everyone aboard the Polar Tang already knew, drawing hands had long since become second nature to you. While you carefully sketched Law’s hand, he concentrated on drawing yours.
On the same sheet of paper rested two intertwined hands.
One was long and slender, tattooed from wrist to fingers, its elegant bones subtly visible beneath the skin as the thumb traced a gentle caress across the other.
The second was smaller, the fingers a little stiff, the nail beds broader than he had initially managed to capture. Fortunately, under your patient guidance, it changed shape minute by minute until it became something that felt perfect to the two of you, even if any self-proclaimed art critic, whose opinion neither of you had asked for in the first place, would’ve called it an awkward collision of two entirely different styles.
The finished page found its place in a frame on your bedside table before the two of you drifted off to sleep, laughter still lingering softly between you in the darkness.
It would stay there for years afterward, long after dozens of sketchbooks had come and gone, because neither of you could ever bring yourselves to replace the first piece of yourselves you had left on the same page.
After an exhausting national team training camp runs hours longer than expected, Kageyama returns home carrying more than physical fatigue. Convinced he's ruined the dinner date the two of you had been planning for weeks, he prepares himself for disappointment—only to find you waiting with his favorite homemade meal and the same unwavering smile that's always been his safe place. What follows is a quiet evening of heartfelt apologies, grateful kisses, shared dinner, and sleepy cuddles that remind Kageyama that home has never been a place... it's always been you.
Warnings: Pure domestic fluff, established relationship, hurt/comfort, soft and affectionate Kageyama, rain ambience, emotional reassurance, kisses, hugs, cooking together, cuddling, praise, sleepy intimacy (non-explicit), comfort food, happy ending.
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The rain continued its steady drum against the window, but inside the kitchen, the atmosphere shifted.
Kageyama stood by the stove, the spatula held loosely in his hand as he stared down at the sizzling rice. Despite his focus on the food, his broad shoulders were visibly tense, slumped with a heavy, exhausting weight that went far beyond physical fatigue.
He hadn't just been pushed to his limits at camp; he was carrying a quiet, frustrating guilt that had been eating at him all the way on the train ride home.
"Tobio?" you asked softly, leaning forward on the barstool. "What's wrong?"
He didn't answer right away. He turned off the burner, slid the pan onto a cool grate, and stood there for a second, staring at the floor. When he finally turned to face you, his dark blue eyes were clouded with an intense, troubled look.
"The training camp," he said, his voice lower and rougher than usual. "They extended the final scrimmage block by four hours. We didn't get dismissed until late evening." He stepped closer to the island, his hands clenching into loose fists at his sides. "I missed the dinner. I missed the whole date. We planned it for three weeks."
He looked incredibly frustrated—not at the coaches, but at himself, as if his dedication to volleyball had somehow let you down. He was braced for you to be disappointed, or at least a little lonely.
Instead, you just smiled, reaching across the counter to grab his hand.
"Tobio, I'm not upset at all," you said gently, squeezing his calloused fingers. "I was watching the live updates from the scrimmage. You played incredibly well. I'm so proud of you."
Kageyama blinked, momentarily stunned. The intense, worried line between his brows began to soften. "You... you aren't mad?"
"Of course not," you laughed softly, sliding off your stool. "In fact, I figured you'd be starving when you got back. So..."
You walked over to the counter and pulled a small towel off a large, covered ceramic dish, revealing a beautiful, freshly prepared spread of hamburg steak—his absolute favorite—complete with a rich glaze and perfectly cut vegetables. "I made this for you so we could still have our dinner together, even if it's late."
Kageyama stood entirely still.
He didn't move, his tall frame casting a long shadow across the kitchen floor. He stared down at the beautifully glazed meal you had painstakingly prepared for him, and then his eyes slowly drifted up to meet yours.
He didn't speak. He just looked at you—intently, quietly, with an intensity that made the rest of the room fade away. His throat bobbed as he swallowed hard, his mouth opening slightly as if to say something, but no words came out. He was completely stuck, overwhelmed by the sheer warmth of finding you here, waiting for him, entirely unbothered by his mistake.
Slowly, almost hesitantly, he reached across the kitchen island. His large, calloused hand slid over the counter, his knuckles brushing against yours before his fingers spread and closed tightly around your hand. He squeezed—firm and grounding, a silent apology and an immense thank you wrapped into a single physical pressure.
"Tobio?" you murmured.
He finally moved, stepping around the island until he was standing directly in front of you. He didn't immediately lean in. Instead, he slowly bent his knees, lowering himself until he could gently rest his forehead right against yours.
His eyes closed. He just stayed there like that for a long, quiet moment, his cool skin warming against yours, his deep, shaky breath fanning across your cheeks.
"I'm sorry," he whispered, his voice incredibly raw. "And... thank you."
Before you could reply, his arms wrapped around you. He pulled you in with a desperate, unyielding strength, burying his face in the crook of your neck. It was a long, heavy hug—the kind where he let his entire weight relax against you, holding you so tight that you could feel the rapid, steady thud of his heart against your chest. He held you as if he were memorizing the exact feeling of having you in his arms after three long days apart.
Only after a long, silent minute did he slowly pull back. His hands slid up to gently cup your cheeks, his thumbs tracing your cheekbones, his gaze locked onto your lips.
And then, finally, he leaned down and kissed you.
It wasn't his usual quick, shy peck. This kiss was warm, heavy with gratitude, and sweet enough to make your knees go slightly weak. His lips were soft against yours, parting slightly as he poured every ounce of his relief and love into the kiss. His hands pressed firmly into your lower back, holding you close as if he couldn't believe how lucky he was.
When he finally pulled back just a fraction, his forehead rested against yours again, his breathing shallow. He leaned down and kissed you again, a quick, lingering press of his lips, then another on your cheek, and one more on the crown of your head.
"Let me help," he murmured, refusing to let go of your waist entirely.
What followed was a chaotic, sweet blur of kitchen fluff. Kageyama, still clinging to your side, insisted on holding the plates while you scooped the rice. Every time you reached for a serving spoon, he would lean down to press a soft kiss to your shoulder, his damp hair brushing against your neck.
"Tobio, I can't scoop the gravy if you keep kissing my cheek," you laughed, though you didn't make any move to stop him.
"Just one more," he mumbled, his voice sleepy but stubborn as he pressed his lips to the corner of your mouth, lingering there until you let out a quiet sigh of defeat.
Eventually, you managed to get the food to the table. You ate together in the quiet, warm glow of the kitchen, Kageyama practically beaming with every bite of the meal you had prepared. The guilt that had weighed his shoulders down was completely gone, replaced by a relaxed, content comfort.
Once the plates were cleared—which Kageyama insisted on washing himself, though he let you dry them just so you could stay close—he carried you, quite literally, down the hallway to the bedroom.
The moment you both hit the mattress, Kageyama pulled you into his arms, burying his face in your hair. He wrapped his long legs around yours, completely anchoring you to his side.
In the dim light of the bedroom, he looked down at you, his eyes heavy with a deep, peaceful sleepiness. He reached up, his large hand gently cupping your face, his thumb sweeping over your bottom lip.
"I love you," he whispered, his voice a soft, raspy murmur. "So much."
"I love you too, Tobio," you replied.
He leaned down, kissing you one last time—a slow, tender, sleepy kiss that tasted like home and quiet rainy nights. He tucked the heavy blankets securely around your shoulders, pulled you close against his warm chest, and let his eyes finally drift closed, his heart beating a steady, comforting rhythm against your cheek as you both drifted off to sleep.
Long-distance was never easy, but Nishinoya Yuu refused to let thousands of miles become an excuse to love you any less. No matter what country he found himself in, every night ended the same way—with a video call. Between stories of breathtaking sunsets, near-death encounters with overly confident seagulls, and promises of all the places he'd take you one day, the distance somehow felt a little smaller. And on the nights when missing each other became too much to bear, neither of you hung up first, choosing instead to fall asleep together through a phone screen.
Warnings: Pure fluff and comfort. Established relationship, long-distance romance, late-night video calls, sleepy conversations, travel stories, gentle teasing, soft confessions, cuddling through a screen, wholesome dialogue, and two people proving that love doesn't need the same time zone to feel like home. Happy ending.
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The digital chime of your phone cutting through the silence of your dark bedroom was a sound you had quickly learned to associate with a sudden, inevitable rush of warmth.
It was exactly 2:14 AM.
You rolled over in bed, burying half your face in your pillow as you fumbled for the glowing device on your nightstand. The screen lit up your face, displaying a contact name flanked by a string of chaotic emojis—sparkles, wild animals, and a volleyball.
You swiped to accept, and the screen instantly filled with a flurry of motion, a crackle of wind, and a blinding grin.
"Hey! You're awake! I didn't wake you up, did I? Tell me I didn't wake you up, but also I'm so glad you answered!"
Nishinoya Yuu’s face was pressed incredibly close to the camera, his dark eyes sparkling with a familiar, boundless energy. His hair, usually styled into his signature, gravity-defying spike, was completely down. It fell softly around his forehead and ears, damp and messy from either a recent swim or the humid night air of wherever he had landed yesterday. He was wearing a faded, oversized tank top, his shoulders deeply sun-kissed, a stark contrast to the pale, cozy blankets you were buried under.
"Yuu," you mumbled, your voice thick with sleep, a small, involuntary smile tugging at the corner of your lips. "It's past two in the morning."
"Ah! I knew it!" He looked momentarily apologetic, his shoulders dropping, but the excitement quickly surged back, puffing his chest out. "But look! You have to see this. I couldn't wait until your morning. I literally ran back to the hostel just to get a good Wi-Fi signal so I could call you."
He spun the camera around. The shaky footage smoothed out to reveal a breathtaking view. He was standing on a wooden balcony overlooking a dark, glistening expanse of water—the Mediterranean, if your memory of his chaotic itinerary served you right. Far in the distance, the cliffside of a coastal Italian town was dotted with warm, amber lights that looked like fallen stars scattered along the rocks. The sound of gentle waves crashing against the shore bled through your phone speaker, a rhythmic, soothing backdrop to his breathless narration.
"Isn't it crazy?" Yuu’s voice came back, loud and clear, though he was trying—and failing—to keep it down for the sake of his sleeping hostel roommates. "The water here is so blue during the day, it doesn't even look real. It looks like someone poured paint into the ocean. And tonight, the moon is so bright it’s casting a silver path all the way to the horizon. I swear, I wanted to jump off the balcony and try to run across it!"
"Please don't jump off any balconies," you laughed softly, resting your chin on your arms, staring at the screen. "I'd like you back in one piece."
"Don't worry, my balance is legendary! You know that!" He flipped the camera back to himself, leaning his chin against his palm as he propped the phone up on the balcony railing. His grin softened into something incredibly tender as he looked at you. "Man... I really miss you. Seeing your face right now is the best part of my day, hands down."
The sudden shift from high-energy explorer to sweet, earnest boyfriend caught you off guard, making your heart do a familiar flutter. "I miss you too, Yuu. How has the food been?"
"Oh, my god, the food!" He sat up straight, his eyes wide. "Okay, so today, I found this tiny little bakery down an alley that smelled like heaven. I didn't even know what I was ordering, I just pointed at this pastry and yelled 'Questo, per favore!' with the best accent I could muster. The old lady behind the counter laughed so hard she gave me two of them! It was filled with this sweet cream, and the crust was so flaky it got all over my shirt. I thought about you the whole time because I know you would’ve stolen half of it."
"I absolutely would have," you agreed, shifting under your blankets. "And you would have let me."
"Duh! I’d give you the whole thing," he said instantly, without a shred of hesitation. He leaned closer to the screen, his gaze tracing your features. "Hey, you look sleepy. Are you cold?"
"A little," you admitted, pulling the duvet up to your nose. "It's freezing here tonight. I wish I had your weather."
"I wish I could share it with you," Yuu murmured, his voice dropping into a register that was rare for him—soft, quiet, and intensely intimate. He looked down at his own hands, then back up at the screen. "When I was walking along the beach earlier, the sand was still warm from the sun. I was thinking... next time, we’re coming here together. No excuses. I'm going to show you every single spot I found. I'll carry your bags, I'll buy you all the pastries, and we can just sit on the sand until the sun goes down."
"Promise?"
"I never break my promises!" He thumped his fist against his chest, right over his heart, a fierce determination shining in his eyes. "Just picture it. You and me, eating gelato, walking around these crazy old streets. I'll even protect you from the seagull I had a fight with yesterday."
You let out a quiet giggle. "A fight with a seagull?"
"It tried to steal my sandwich!" Yuu defended himself, puffing his cheeks out indignantly. "It was a tactical retreat on my part, okay? Those things are ruthless. But for you, I would've fought to the death. No bird is taking your lunch on my watch."
You stared at the glowing screen, feeling incredibly close to him despite the thousands of miles of land and ocean separating you. It was in moments like this—when he was rambling about seagulls, his hair damp and messy, his eyes full of absolute devotion—that the distance felt manageable. He brought his entire, vibrant world right to your bedside.
"You're ridiculous, Yuu," you whispered affectionately.
"I'm serious!" he insisted, though a bright, boyish grin broke across his face. He shifted on his end, moving back inside his room. The background changed to a cozy, rustic room with stone walls and a small bed. He collapsed backward onto his mattress, holding the phone above his face. "Ah, my legs are killing me. I walked like fifteen miles today. But it was totally worth it."
"You need to rest, too," you said, watching him stretch out. "Don't overexert yourself just because you have endless energy."
"Hey, even the great Nishinoya Yuu needs to recharge," he chuckled, rolling onto his side. He propped his head up on his arm, holding the phone steady. The angle showed his sharp jawline and the relaxed, sleepy curve of his shoulders. "But talking to you is how I recharge. Seriously. It’s like... when I'm traveling, everything is so fast and new. It's awesome, and I love it. But when I call you, it feels like I can finally take a deep breath. You're my home, you know?"
Your chest tightened with a sweet, aching warmth. "Yuu..."
"I mean it," he said, his eyes unwavering. He reached a finger out, gently tapping his screen right where your cheek was on his display. "Right there. I'm touching your face. Can you feel it?"
"Yeah," you whispered, matching his action and tapping your screen where his cheek was. "I can feel it."
A soft, pink dust settled over his cheeks, and he let out a shy, breathy laugh, burying his face in his arm for a brief second before looking back at you. "Man, you're too cute. It’s not fair. I want to hug you so bad right now. I want to squeeze you until you complain that I’m holding on too tight."
"I wouldn't complain," you said softly. "Not tonight."
"Then I'd hold you even tighter," he promised, his voice incredibly gentle.
For a long while, neither of you spoke. The silence wasn't heavy or awkward; it was comfortable, filled only with the soft rustle of your blankets and the distant, faint hum of the Italian night through his open window. You watched his eyes flutter slightly, the exhaustion of his long day finally catching up to him, though he stubbornly kept his eyelids pried open to keep looking at you.
"Yuu, you can close your eyes," you murmured, your own eyelids growing heavy. "I'm not going anywhere."
"No way," he mumbled, though his blink lasted a second too long. "Want to keep looking at you. What if you disappear when I close them?"
"I won't disappear. I'll be right here on the screen."
"Promise?" he echoed your earlier question, a sleepy, vulnerable edge to his tone.
"I promise. I'll stay on the line until you fall asleep."
"Okay..." He let out a long, contented sigh, shifting his pillow so he could rest his cheek comfortably while still keeping the camera pointed at his face. His dark eyes softened as they locked onto yours one last time. "Hey. I love you."
"I love you too, Yuu. Sleep well."
"Love you more," he mumbled, his voice dragging slightly as his eyes finally drifted shut. "Next time... gelato... and no seagulls..."
You couldn't help but let out one last, quiet laugh at his sleepy rambling. You watched him on your screen as his breathing slowed into a deep, steady rhythm, his features completely relaxed and peaceful.
Even with an entire ocean between you, wrapped in the quiet chill of the late-night hours, you had never felt warmer. You nestled deeper into your blankets, resting your phone on the pillow next to your head so his sleeping face was the last thing you saw, and let yourself drift off to sleep to the faint, distant sound of the Mediterranean waves.
Summary:
After one of the worst workdays he's had in months, Akaashi finds himself stranded at the station in the pouring rain with no umbrella, no energy, and nothing left to give. He never asks for help—not when he's overwhelmed, not when he's hurting—but you know him well enough to notice anyway. Sometimes love isn't grand declarations or dramatic confessions. Sometimes it's checking the weather, bringing an umbrella, cooking dinner, and reminding the person you love that they never have to carry everything alone.
Warnings:
Pure domestic fluff, hurt/comfort, comfort after a stressful workday, overworked Akaashi, editor!Akaashi, established relationship, rain, caretaking, emotional vulnerability, soft kisses, cuddling, light clinginess, comfort food, quiet confessions, lots of forehead and temple kisses, mentions of marriage, happy ending.
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The manuscript had been sitting open on Akaashi's monitor since seven that morning, the cursor blinking in the same spot for the better part of an hour. He'd read the paragraph four times now. He still couldn't tell if it was good.
That, more than anything, was what told him it was going to be a bad day.
Akaashi Keiji had built his entire professional life around being able to tell, quickly and precisely, whether a piece of writing worked. It was the one skill he trusted completely, the thing that had gotten him hired at the publishing house two years ago and promoted to associate editor eight months after that. He read a manuscript the way he used to read a court — instantly, instinctively, without needing to think about the thinking. But this morning the sentences on his screen were just shapes. Letters that refused to become meaning.
He rubbed at his eyes and told himself it was exhaustion. He'd been staying past nine most nights this week, ferrying red pen notes back and forth with an author who was, politely put, difficult, and not-so-politely put, convinced that Akaashi's every suggestion was a personal attack on his genius. The book — a debut literary novel the higher-ups had pinned significant hopes on — was due to go to the printer in eleven days. It was not ready. Akaashi had said as much in yesterday's meeting, calmly, professionally, with three specific examples prepared in advance.
His director had looked at him the way you look at someone who has said something inconvenient but true, and said, "Make it ready, then."
As if readiness were a matter of will. As if Akaashi hadn't spent the last six weeks trying to drag competence out of prose that fought him at every turn.
He'd gone home that night and hadn't told you any of it. You'd asked how his day was and he'd said "fine" in the flat, closed-off tone that — if you'd been paying attention, and he suspected you had — meant the exact opposite. He wasn't proud of that. He just hadn't had the words left to explain it.
By ten a.m. the day had metastasized.
The author — Takahara-san, a man twelve years Akaashi's senior who seemed to have decided early on that an editor twenty-something years old could not possibly know anything — called the office directly instead of emailing, which he only did when he wanted to be difficult in real time.
"I don't understand why you keep cutting chapter twelve," Takahara said, without preamble. "It's the emotional center of the book."
"It's forty pages of a conversation that repeats what the reader already knows from chapter nine," Akaashi said, keeping his voice level. He had this argument memorized at this point; he could have recited both sides of it in his sleep. "If we tighten it to the essential exchange, the emotional weight lands harder because it isn't diluted."
"You don't understand the character."
Akaashi closed his eyes briefly. "I understand the character. I've read the manuscript eleven times."
"Have you? Because it doesn't feel like it."
He wanted, badly, to say something he would regret. Instead he said, "I'll send over a version with the cuts tracked, so you can see exactly what changes and what stays. We can go through it together tomorrow." He kept his tone professional. Even. The kind of even that costs something to maintain.
Takahara made a noise that wasn't quite agreement and hung up.
Akaashi sat with the phone still in his hand for a second too long.
By 1:40, someone had eaten the lunch he'd left in the office fridge — his name written on the container in permanent marker, unmissable — and it was such a small thing, objectively, and yet it landed like the final indignity of the entire week. He didn't eat. He told himself he'd grab something later and then simply didn't, because there wasn't a later — there was only the next fire, and the one after that.
At 2 p.m. his director called him in and told him, gently but unmistakably, that if chapter twelve wasn't resolved by Friday, the release date would need to be pushed, and that a pushed release date reflected on the editor as much as the author.
"I understand," Akaashi said, and he did understand, that was the worst part. He understood every piece of it and none of it was fully within his control and all of it would land on him regardless.
He went back to his desk. He looked at the manuscript. The cursor blinked in the same place.
Somewhere around four, he realized his jaw had been clenched for so long that it ached. He realized, too, that he was doing the thing he always did when things went badly — going quiet, folding everything down into something small and manageable and private, because it was easier to carry a feeling alone than to hand it to someone else and watch them try to figure out what to do with it.
He didn't like how much that thought sounded like an old excuse.
He left the office a little after seven, later than he'd wanted, earlier than the work deserved. The sky had been grey and heavy-looking since noon, that specific color that always meant business, and by the time he reached the station entrance the first drops were already coming down — fat, unhurried, deliberate, the kind of rain that wasn't going to be talked out of staying.
He hadn't brought an umbrella. He'd checked the forecast three days ago and it had said nothing about rain, and somewhere in the avalanche of everything else today he hadn't thought to check again.
Of course, he thought, standing under the station overhang and watching the rain pick up speed. Of course.
It was such a small thing. An umbrella. A forgotten umbrella was nothing, a non-event, the kind of minor inconvenience that happened to everyone constantly and meant nothing about anything. And yet standing there, jaw still tight, stomach hollow from a lunch he never ate, chapter twelve unresolved and glowing accusingly somewhere in his mind, Akaashi felt something in his chest give a little, the way a shelf gives when one final book is placed on it.
He wasn't a person who cried easily, or visibly, or at all really — Bokuto liked to joke that Akaashi's face had two settings, "reading" and "slightly less reading" — but he stood there under the overhang with the rain coming down in sheets past the edge of the roof, and his eyes stung, just slightly, just enough that he had to blink hard and look somewhere else.
It's just rain, he told himself. It's just a bad day. Everyone has bad days.
He believed it, mostly. It didn't make the ache in his chest go away.
He thought about calling you. His thumb even hovered over your contact for a second before he put the phone back in his pocket. He didn't want to make this your problem too — didn't want to be the person who called his partner just to unload a day that wasn't even that serious, in the grand scheme of things. No one was hurt. Nothing was actually wrong. He was just tired, and it was raining, and he'd have to either wait it out or get soaked walking to the bus stop, and neither of those felt like a reason to interrupt your evening.
So he stood there instead, watching the rain, feeling — absurdly, disproportionately — like the whole day had finally caught up with him at the one moment he had no defenses left for it.
He almost missed you.
He was looking down at his phone, rereading Takahara's email for the fifth time as though the words might rearrange themselves into something more reasonable, when a voice cut through the noise of the rain.
"Keiji."
He looked up.
You were standing a few feet away, just past the edge of the overhang, an umbrella — pale blue, the one that lived by the front door, the one you always joked was "his" because he was the only one who ever remembered to grab it — already open above your head, your other hand lifted in a small wave like you weren't sure if he'd seen you yet.
For a second he just looked at you. Rain was coming down harder now, drumming against the umbrella canopy, misting slightly at the edges where the wind caught it, and you were standing there in a coat that wasn't warm enough for this weather, hair slightly damp at the front where you must have gotten caught in it on the way over, and you were smiling at him like this was nothing, like of course you were here, like there was nowhere else you would possibly be standing at 7:20 on a Tuesday night.
"You didn't check the weather today, did you," you said, stepping closer, tilting the umbrella so it covered both of you before he'd even fully processed that you were real and not some tired-brain hallucination conjured out of wanting. "I figured. You get like this when work's bad — forget everything that isn't the thing stressing you out."
He opened his mouth. Nothing came out for a moment.
"I texted you around six," you continued, apparently not noticing, or noticing and being kind enough not to comment on, the fact that he currently looked a little like someone who'd forgotten how words worked. "You didn't answer, which, fair, you were probably still fighting with that manuscript. But then I saw the forecast changed and I thought — well. I know that walk from the station gets bad when it really comes down, so." You shrugged, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. "Figured I'd come meet you instead of making you deal with the bus in this."
"You didn't have to do that," Akaashi said, and his voice came out rougher than he meant it to.
"I know I didn't have to." You bumped your shoulder gently against his arm. "I wanted to. Come on, you look like you're freezing just standing here."
He wasn't, particularly — the overhang had kept most of the rain off him, and it wasn't especially cold for the season — but he didn't correct you. He was too busy trying to identify the feeling currently unfolding in his chest, something that didn't have a clean name, something between relief and being unbearably moved and a kind of gratitude so sudden and total it almost embarrassed him.
He'd spent the entire day feeling like everything was slipping out of his hands. The manuscript, the schedule, his patience, his composure, an umbrella he was supposed to remember and hadn't. Every small failure had felt like evidence of something larger — that he wasn't holding things together as well as he needed to, that he was one bad week away from actually falling apart in some quiet, private, humiliating way that no one would notice because he was too practiced at hiding it.
And here you were. You had checked the forecast for him. You had noticed a shift in the weather and thought of him specifically, thought of the walk he'd have to make, thought of it before he'd even known to worry about it himself, and you had gotten up and come to the station in weather you clearly weren't dressed for, holding an umbrella you always called his, just so he wouldn't have to walk home in the rain alone.
It undid something in him. Quietly, but completely.
"Hey," you said, softer now, studying his face in that way you had, the way that always made him feel like you were actually looking at him and not just at the version of him he presented to everyone else. "You okay? You've got a weird look."
"I'm fine," he said automatically — and then, because it was you, because you'd just stood in the rain for him and he was suddenly, fiercely tired of the reflex to minimize everything, he amended it. "I'm not, actually. It was a bad day."
Something in your expression softened further. "Yeah. I figured, when you didn't text back and then didn't call even after the rain started. You usually call when it's raining, so I can meet you or tell you to just take a cab." You reached over, without any particular fanfare, and laced your fingers through his — his hand cold from the outdoor air, yours warm from wherever you'd been before you came out — and gave it a small squeeze. "You don't have to tell me about it right now if you don't want. Let's just get you home first."
He looked down at your joined hands. At the umbrella tilted slightly to keep the rain off him more than off yourself, so that your shoulder was already darkening with damp while his stayed dry. At you, waiting, patient, not pushing, just there.
"Thank you," he said, and it came out quieter and more fervent than he intended, like it meant something bigger than the two words could really hold. "For coming."
"Of course I came," you said, like it was obvious, like it had never occurred to you to do anything else. "I'm not gonna let you walk home in the rain after a day like that. What kind of partner would I be."
He didn't have an answer for that. He just held your hand a little tighter and let you lead him out from under the overhang, out into the rain-loud evening, the umbrella a small dry world over both your heads, and thought, with a kind of dazed clarity that cut cleanly through everything the day had piled onto him: I love you so much it's inconvenient.
The walk home was fifteen minutes, and Akaashi spent most of it quieter than usual, though it was a different kind of quiet than the one he'd carried through the office all day — softer, looser, less like something being held shut and more like something finally being allowed to settle.
You didn't push him to talk. You asked one gentle question — "Bad Takahara day, or bad everything day?" — and when he said, "Bad everything day, but yes, also Takahara," you just nodded and let the rest come out at his own pace, in fragments, as you walked. The chapter twelve fight. The uncorrected proofs. His lunch, which made you laugh despite yourself — "someone ate your labeled lunch? That's a war crime, Keiji, I'm serious" — which, absurdly, made him laugh too, the first real laugh he'd had all day, short and surprised out of him.
By the time you reached the apartment building, some of the tightness had gone out of his shoulders. Not all of it. But some.
He held the umbrella himself for the last stretch, insisting, once he realized how wet your side had gotten, and you let him, mostly because arguing about it would have taken longer than just letting him do it.
The apartment was warm when you got the door open, warm in the specific way a space is when you've left the heater running low all afternoon in anticipation of someone coming home cold and tired. Akaashi noticed it immediately — the temperature, the smell of something that had been simmering, faintly, on the stove, the lamp in the living room already on instead of the harsher overhead light.
"You started dinner," he said, toeing off his shoes, something in his chest doing that same unsteady, grateful thing it had done at the station.
"I figured you probably didn't eat lunch," you said, hanging up the blue umbrella by the door, shrugging out of your damp coat. "Am I wrong?"
"...No."
"Yeah, that's what I thought. Go change into something dry, I'll finish up in here."
He went, but slower than usual, glancing back at you once from the hallway — you were already in the kitchen, sleeves pushed up, checking whatever was on the stove, humming something under your breath that he couldn't quite place — and he had the sudden, overwhelming urge to just stand there and watch you for a while. To catalog it. The warm light. The smell of dinner. You, unbothered, at home, doing this small ordinary thing that on any other day might have gone completely unremarked and tonight felt like the single kindest gesture anyone had ever made toward him.
He made himself keep walking. He'd have plenty of time to be near you in a few minutes. He didn't need to be strange about it in the doorway.
(He was going to be a little strange about it later anyway. He could already tell.)
Dinner was simple — rice, a quick vegetable stir fry, the kind of miso soup you'd learned to make from watching him do it enough times that you'd more or less absorbed the recipe by osmosis — but it was hot, and it was there, and Akaashi ate like a man who had, in fact, forgotten lunch entirely.
You talked while he ate, filling the space easily, telling him about your own day in a low, unhurried voice that asked nothing of him except that he listen if he wanted to, and he did want to — found himself hanging on it more than usual, in fact, grateful for something to focus on besides chapter twelve and Takahara's voice and the particular ache of having felt, for a few hours today, entirely alone.
He wasn't alone. He kept having to remind himself of that, tonight, like the fact of you needed re-proving every few minutes. He wasn't alone. You were right here, across the table, gesturing with your chopsticks about something that had happened at your own job, completely unaware — or maybe not unaware, maybe just kind enough not to comment on it — of the way he kept looking at you like he was afraid you'd disappear if he looked away too long.
"Keiji," you said eventually, setting your chopsticks down, tilting your head at him. "You're staring."
"Sorry." He wasn't, particularly. "I'm listening."
"You're staring and listening," you allowed, amused. "Rough day really did a number on you, huh."
He considered how to answer that honestly. "It was one of the worst days I've had in a while," he admitted. "Work-wise. Takahara's impossible, the schedule's slipping, and it's going to reflect on me even though I've done everything I can think of to fix it." He paused. "And then it started raining, and I didn't have an umbrella, and I just — stood there for a minute, feeling like the day had won."
Your expression, across the table, went gentle in a way that made his throat tight. "And then?"
"And then you were there," he said simply. "With the umbrella. And it was — " He stopped, because the sentence he wanted to say felt too big, too sudden, too much like the kind of thing he usually kept folded up small and private, and he wasn't sure how to hand it to you without it sounding strange.
"And it was what?" you prompted, softly, not pushing, just leaving the door open.
He looked at you — really looked, the way he had at the station, the rain and the streetlights and your damp hair and your ordinary blue umbrella held over both your heads like it was nothing, like it was the easiest decision in the world — and he said, quietly, "It was the best part of my entire day. Maybe my whole week."
You blinked. Something crossed your face — surprised, then touched, then something warmer still. "Keiji—"
"I mean it," he said, before you could deflect it into a joke, which he could tell you were gearing up to do by the way your mouth was already curving. "I've had a genuinely bad day. One of the worst in months. And somehow you standing at the station with an umbrella you didn't need to bring, in weather you weren't even dressed for, fixed more of it than anything else could have." He shook his head slightly, like he still couldn't fully account for it. "I don't know how you did that. I don't know how something so small did that."
"It's not small," you said, quiet now too, reaching across the table to cover his hand with yours. "It's not small to me either, you know. Taking care of you isn't a small thing. I want to do it."
He turned his hand over under yours, laced your fingers together the way he had at the station, and for a moment neither of you said anything else, just sat there in the warm kitchen with the rain still going outside, dinner half-finished, something quietly, thoroughly settled between you.
"I think," Akaashi said eventually, "you've ruined my ability to be subtle about how much I like you. Statistically speaking, given how long we've been together, I should be better at hiding this by now."
You laughed — surprised, delighted, a little pink around the ears. "That might be the most Akaashi thing you've ever said. 'Statistically.'"
"I stand by it," he said, and he was almost smiling now, the first real one all day, small but entirely real.
After dinner, he insisted on doing the dishes — "you cooked, it's only fair" — though he moved through the task slower than usual, and you noticed, leaning against the counter with a dish towel, that he kept finding small excuses to be near you. Reaching past you for the rice bowl he technically didn't need to reach for yet. Brushing your shoulder when he set a plate in the drying rack. Once, entirely unnecessarily, resting his hip against yours for a moment while he dried his hands, like he just wanted the contact and didn't feel like justifying it.
"You're being clingy," you observed, not unkindly, nudging him with your elbow.
"Am I," he said, in a tone that suggested he was aware of it and had decided not to be embarrassed about it tonight.
"You are. It's cute."
"I had a bad day," he said again, like this explained everything, and — to be fair to him — it more or less did.
You didn't argue further. You just handed him the last dish and let him finish, and when he was done he didn't go sit on the couch the way he normally would while you finished tidying the kitchen — he stayed standing near you, close enough that his sleeve brushed yours every time either of you moved, until you finally laughed and said, "Okay, come here," and pulled him properly into a hug.
He went easily. More than easily — he practically folded into it, arms coming around you fully, face tucking into the curve of your neck, a long breath leaving him that sounded like it had been held in since roughly nine that morning.
"Rough day," you murmured again, one hand coming up to rest against the back of his head, fingers threading lightly through his still-slightly-damp hair.
"Extremely," he agreed, voice muffled against your skin. "I don't want to talk about Takahara anymore tonight."
"Then we won't. Deal."
He stayed like that for a long moment, not saying anything else, just breathing, just being held, and you let him, swaying very slightly on the spot the way you sometimes did when he needed exactly this and hadn't been able to ask for it directly.
"Thank you," he said again, eventually, quiet against your neck. "For today. For the umbrella. For — all of it."
"You don't have to keep thanking me," you said, smiling into his hair. "That's just what I do. That's just — us."
"I know." He pulled back just enough to look at you, and something in his expression was unguarded in a way it rarely got, even after all this time together — soft, a little raw, entirely sincere. "I know that. I'm thanking you anyway."
You ended up on the couch not long after, which was where Akaashi's clinginess, as you'd diagnosed it, really settled in for the evening.
He sat close enough that there was no real reason for the amount of contact happening between you — his arm along the back of the couch behind you, then around you properly within about four minutes, then his head resting against yours, then, eventually, once you'd turned on some low, forgettable show neither of you were really watching, his whole weight leaning into you like he intended to simply become a permanent fixture of your side for the remainder of the evening.
"You're very heavy for someone who skipped lunch," you told him, though you made no move to actually shift him off.
"You're very warm," he replied, which wasn't a denial or an apology, just a statement of fact, delivered with his eyes half-closed and his voice gone soft and unhurried in a way it almost never was, not even at home, not even with you.
You ran your fingers idly through his hair, the same slow motion from the kitchen, and felt him relax further into you with every pass, shoulders dropping, breathing slowing, the tension of the day visibly leaving him in increments.
"Bad days like today," you said quietly, into the low light and the sound of rain still tapping steadily against the window, "you don't have to wait until you're standing in the rain with no umbrella to tell me about them. You could just text me. 'Hey, today's bad.' That's it. That's the whole message."
He was quiet for a moment. "I don't like making my bad days your problem."
"They're not a problem," you said. "They're just — mine to help with, if I can. That's not a burden, Keiji. That's the whole point of doing this together." You tapped his forehead lightly, gently teasing to soften the honesty of it. "You'd do the same for me in a heartbeat. You have done the same for me. Let me do it back sometimes."
He was silent again, but it was a different kind of silence — the kind you'd learned, over years together, meant he was actually weighing something rather than shutting it down. Finally he said, "I'll try. I'm not — good at asking for things, when I'm already overwhelmed. It feels like adding weight to something that's already too heavy."
"I know," you said softly. "I'm not asking you to be perfect at it. I'm just asking you to try. And in the meantime — I'll keep checking the forecast. I'll keep showing up at the station if it looks bad. You don't even have to ask for that part. That one's just going to happen regardless."
He huffed something that was almost a laugh, tilting his head to press a kiss to your temple. "I noticed. You didn't even hesitate today."
"Why would I hesitate? You're my favorite person standing in the rain without an umbrella. Least I can do."
"Your favorite person," he repeated, something warm and a little amused threading through the words. "High praise."
"Don't let it go to your head."
"Too late," he said, and pulled you a little closer, tucking you properly against his side, "it's already there. Along with several other things about you I'm apparently unable to stop thinking about tonight."
"Oh?" You raised an eyebrow, glancing up at him. "Like what?"
He considered the question seriously, the way he considered most things, and then said, quiet and honest in the near-dark of the living room, rain still murmuring against the glass: "Like the fact that you knew, before I even called, that I'd need someone at that station tonight. That you thought of me in the middle of your own day, busy as it probably was, and decided that was more important than staying dry." His hand found yours again, fingers lacing together the way they had all evening, like he needed the reminder of contact more than usual tonight and had simply stopped pretending otherwise. "I've had a genuinely terrible day, and somehow, because of you, I don't really remember most of it anymore. I just remember the umbrella."
You didn't say anything clever back to that. You just leaned up and kissed him, slow and unhurried, and felt him melt into it the way he'd been melting into every point of contact since the station, like today had stripped away whatever reserve he usually kept between himself and being fully, openly loved, and what was left underneath was just this — honest, unguarded, entirely yours.
"I love you," he murmured against your mouth, when the kiss broke, like it was a fact that needed restating tonight specifically. "I love you a genuinely inconvenient amount."
"I love you too," you said, smiling, resting your forehead against his. "Even on your worst days. Especially on your worst days, honestly."
"Especially," he agreed, and pulled you back in against him, settling in like he had nowhere else in the world he needed to be, rain still falling steady and unbothered outside the window, chapter twelve still unresolved somewhere in an inbox he had no intention of opening again tonight, and none of it mattering nearly as much, right now, as the fact that you were here, warm and solid and entirely his, exactly where you'd chosen to be all evening.
Later, once the show had ended and neither of you had bothered to pick another one, once the rain outside had softened into something gentler, a quiet backdrop instead of a downpour, Akaashi finally spoke again, voice heavy with the particular drowsiness of someone whose entire nervous system had finally been allowed to stand down.
"Today was terrible," he said, into your shoulder, eyes closed. "Objectively. Every part of it, until seven-twenty."
"And then?"
"And then it might have been one of the best days I've had in a long time," he admitted, and you could feel him smiling faintly against your skin, tired and soft and entirely sincere. "Funny how that works."
"Not that funny," you said, pressing a kiss to the top of his head. "That's just what happens when someone loves you enough to check the weather for you."
"Mm." He tightened his arm around you, settling further into the couch, into you, into a day that had gone from unbearable to unforgettable somewhere in the space of a fifteen-minute walk under one shared umbrella. "Remind me I owe you something bigger than an umbrella, one of these days."
"You don't owe me anything," you said, tilting your head to look at him. "That's not how this works."
"I know." His eyes were already closing again, voice going heavy and unhurried. "Doesn't mean I don't want to. I keep thinking I'd like to spend a lot more of these with you. The bad ones and the good ones both."
"You're getting sentimental. It's very late for you to be this sentimental."
"I had a bad day," he murmured, which by now had become something closer to a joke between the two of you than an explanation, and pressed a last, sleepy kiss to your shoulder. "Goodnight. Thank you for the umbrella."
You watched him for a long moment — his closed eyes, his loosened shoulders, the small, satisfied almost-smile still resting on his mouth — and let it go, for now. There'd be time to bring it back up later, when he was less half-asleep and more able to mean things out loud.
Tonight, you simply pulled the blanket off the back of the couch, draped it over both of you, and let him fall asleep exactly where he was — clingy, worn out, thoroughly loved — while the rain kept falling softly outside, and the umbrella by the door dripped quietly onto the mat, having done its one small, enormous job for the day.
Summary:
Four months apart teaches you and Sakusa how to love through phone screens, time zones, and quiet patience. By the time he finally comes home, the reunion isn't dramatic or loud—it’s simply the overwhelming relief of being able to hold each other again. As the days pass, you begin to notice the subtle ways the distance has changed him: lingering touches, quiet clinginess, and all the tiny details he'd somehow continued to notice about you from thousands of miles away. Sometimes, love isn't measured by grand declarations—it's measured by the way someone remembers every little thing, and always finds their way home.
Warnings: Long-distance relationship, reunion after months apart, established relationship, hurt/comfort, soft domestic fluff, clingy (but very in-character) Sakusa, quiet intimacy, lots of hugging, forehead kisses, cuddling, mutual pining despite already dating, emotional vulnerability, happy ending.
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The months had been measured out in small rectangles of light.
That was how it felt, anyway, looking back on it — an entire season of Sakusa reduced to a phone screen propped against a stack of books on your nightstand, his face lit faintly blue in whatever hotel room he was calling from that week, the time difference forever working against you both so that his mornings were your evenings and his evenings were your impossible, half-asleep mornings.
You'd gotten good at it, the long distance. Good at reading his silences over the phone the way you'd once read them in person — the particular quiet that meant he was tired rather than upset, the different quiet that meant he was actually upset and simply hadn't found the words yet, the comfortable quiet that meant nothing at all except two people content just to exist on a call together while he answered emails and you graded papers, neither of you needing to fill the space with constant talk.
"You're doing the thing," you'd said, more than once, over those months, catching him mid-scroll through something on his other screen while the call idled between you.
"I'm listening."
"You're not looking at me."
"I can hear you fine without looking at you," he'd said, entirely reasonable, though he'd glance up anyway, just briefly, just enough to prove the point, and you'd catch, even through the compressed, slightly delayed video, the small, private warmth in his eyes that never quite made it into his voice.
It had been four months since he'd left for the training camp circuit — four months of texts sent at odd hours, of video calls squeezed between his practices and your work, of a bed that had slowly stopped feeling like it belonged to two people and started feeling, in the quiet creeping way loneliness worked, like it only belonged to one.
You didn't resent it. You'd known, going into this relationship, exactly what loving a professional athlete would require — the travel, the tournaments, the stretches of separation that came with a career built around a schedule neither of you fully controlled. But knowing something and feeling it were different exercises entirely, and by month three you'd caught yourself, more than once, reaching for his side of the closet just to press your hand against the shirts still hanging there, missing the particular, quiet fact of him being simply present in a room rather than compressed into a small glowing rectangle at the end of a long day.
He landed on a Tuesday.
You'd offered to pick him up from the airport, and he'd said no, quietly, in the particular way he said things he'd already decided on without much room for argument — he'd take a car, he didn't want you fighting traffic after a full day of work, he'd rather just get home and see you there, in the apartment, instead of drawing the reunion out across an arrivals hall full of strangers and luggage carousels.
You understood, without him needing to explain further, that this was simply how Sakusa preferred to do things. Quietly. Without an audience. Without the performance of a big, dramatic moment that other people might have wanted — no tearful sprint across a terminal, no public embrace for strangers to witness. Just the two of you, alone, in the space that had always belonged only to you.
You heard his key in the lock a little after eight, and something in your chest went tight and unsteady in a way four months of video calls had never quite managed to prepare you for.
He stepped inside, dragging his suitcase behind him, and for a moment the two of you simply stood there, several feet apart, looking at each other properly — not through a screen, not with a slight delay lagging his expressions half a second behind his words, just plainly, entirely there.
He looked tired. Good, but tired, the particular exhaustion of months of travel and competition worn faintly at the edges of him, dark circles a shade deeper than you remembered, hair slightly longer than the last time you'd seen him in person, though you'd watched it grow, gradually, across a hundred blurry video calls.
"Hi," you said, voice unsteady, unsure, suddenly, of what the right opening move was after four months apart.
"Hi," he said back, and then, without any further preamble, without the careful, contained composure he usually wore even in private, he crossed the remaining distance between you and pulled you into him, arms wrapping around you with a kind of urgency you rarely saw from him, his face dropping into the curve of your neck, breathing you in like he'd been holding his breath for four straight months and had only just now remembered how.
"Kiyoomi—"
"Give me a minute," he said, muffled, quiet, his voice doing something rough and unfamiliar. "Just — a minute."
You gave him more than a minute. You stood there in the entryway, his suitcase forgotten by the door, holding him while he held you, neither of you saying anything else at all, the whole weight of four months finally allowed to settle instead of being held at arm's length by a screen.
It was later, once you'd both settled onto the couch — him showered, finally free of the recycled airplane air he complained about every single time he flew, dressed in the soft, worn clothes he kept for exactly this kind of evening — that you noticed him watching you with a quiet, careful attention that hadn't fully translated through months of video calls.
"What?" you asked, catching him at it, his eyes lingering on you in a way that made your skin warm.
"Your hair's different," he said, simple, reaching out to touch a strand of it, careful, like he was confirming something he'd already suspected from the compressed, poorly lit video calls of the last several weeks. "You cut it."
"A few inches. A month ago. I mentioned it."
"You did." He kept looking at it, turning it gently between his fingers. "Looks better in person. The camera never got the color right."
"You noticed the color was off? Over video calls?"
"I notice everything about you," he said, plain, like it was simply a fact rather than a confession, and something in your chest went soft and warm at the quiet certainty of it. "You've got a new scar too. Here." He touched, gently, a small mark at the edge of your wrist you'd nearly forgotten about yourself. "Wasn't there before I left."
"I burned myself on the stove. Weeks ago. I didn't even mention that one."
"I know. You didn't need to." He traced it once, careful, before letting your hand rest back in his lap, laced loosely with his own. "I just notice. Whether you tell me or not."
You looked at him for a long moment, something settling deep and quiet in your chest — the plain, unhurried proof of how closely he'd been paying attention this whole time, even from thousands of miles away, even through the flattening distortion of a phone screen. He'd never been a man of many declarations. He rarely told you outright how much he loved you, rarely offered the kind of grand, articulate proclamations some people seemed to need to feel secure. He simply noticed. Everything. The small details other people missed entirely, catalogued and carried with the same careful precision he brought to a serve, to a spike, to every part of his life that mattered to him.
"You really do pay attention," you said, quiet, almost wondering.
"Always have." He glanced up at you, something unguarded in his dark eyes that rarely made it fully to the surface. "Just don't always say so. I know that. I'm working on it."
The apartment, over the following days, slowly began to feel lived in again in a way it hadn't for months.
It was small things, at first — his shoes appearing by the door where they'd always used to sit, his skincare products migrating back into their spot on the bathroom shelf, the particular quiet, deliberate way he moved through the kitchen while making coffee in the mornings, methodical and unhurried, exactly the way he did everything.
You found yourself, more than once, simply standing in a doorway watching him do something entirely ordinary — reading on the couch, folding laundry with the same careful precision he brought to everything, standing at the counter slicing fruit with more focus than the task strictly required — struck by the plain, quiet miracle of him simply being there, present in three dimensions instead of compressed into a small rectangle of light.
"You're staring," he said, one morning, not looking up from the coffee he was making.
"I'm allowed to stare. You were gone for four months."
"I know." Something in his voice softened at that, an admission buried in the simple acknowledgment. "I missed you staring at me. Didn't realize how much until I was back and you started doing it again."
"That's very sentimental of you."
"Don't get used to it," he said, but there was no real bite in it, just the low, familiar warmth that had always lived underneath his careful, contained exterior, and you crossed the kitchen to wrap your arms around him from behind while he finished pouring the coffee, feeling him lean back into the contact almost immediately, unhurried, entirely unbothered by the interruption to his morning routine.
He'd never been like this before — not quite. Sakusa had always been affectionate in his own careful, deliberate way, but there had been, before the four months apart, a certain contained quality to it, a reserve that kept even his warmth at arm's length, measured out in small, precise doses rather than given freely.
That reserve seemed to have dissolved somewhere over the Pacific.
He found reasons to touch you constantly now — a hand at the small of your back while you cooked together, fingers laced through yours during the quiet stretches of an evening spent doing nothing in particular, his arm draped over you on the couch with a possessive, unhurried weight that hadn't been quite so present before. He lingered in doorways when you left a room, watching you go like he needed to confirm, each time, that you were actually still there and not simply another video call about to end.
"You're being clingy," you said, one evening, amused, when he'd followed you into the kitchen for the fourth time that day for no discernible reason beyond simply wanting to be near you.
He paused, something almost sheepish crossing his expression. "Is that a problem?"
"No. Just new. For you, I mean."
"I know." He leaned against the counter, watching you with the same quiet, careful attention from that first night back. "Four months of only seeing you through a screen does something to a person, apparently. I kept catching myself, this whole week, needing to actually touch you. Confirm you're real. Not just — pixels."
"I'm real," you said, gentle, setting down what you'd been doing to face him properly. "I'm right here, Kiyoomi. Not going anywhere."
"I know that too." Something quiet and a little raw passed behind his eyes, the careful composure he usually maintained slipping, just slightly, into something more honest. "Doesn't stop me from wanting to check. Constantly. I'm not used to missing something this much and then getting to have it back. It's — disorienting. In a good way."
It was on the fifth night, lying tangled together in bed with no urgency to either of your schedules the next morning, that you finally said the thing you'd been turning over since he'd walked through the door.
"You know," you said, quiet, tracing an idle line along his forearm where it rested across your waist, "I used to think, before we got together, that you were sort of — hard to read. Everyone said that about you. Quiet. Guarded. Difficult to get close to."
"I remember. You told me that once, early on."
"I don't think that anymore." You tilted your head to look at him properly, finding him already watching you in the dim light of the bedroom, unhurried, patient, the way he always looked at you when he was giving you his full, undivided attention. "I think you're actually the easiest person I've ever loved to understand. You just don't say most of it out loud. You show it instead. The noticing. The small details. The way you touch me like you're confirming I'm real. That was never indifference, was it? All those quiet moments, before, when I thought maybe you were just less affected by things than I was."
Something in his expression shifted, open and a little vulnerable in a way he rarely allowed even now, four months of separation apparently having worn down whatever careful walls used to keep even this kind of honesty at arm's length.
"It was never indifference," he said, quiet, certain. "I just don't do loud very well. Never have. Doesn't mean it's not there. It's just — quieter. The way I love things. The way I love you." He reached up, brushing a strand of hair back from your face with the same careful attention he'd shown it that first night back. "I noticed your haircut before I even landed, from the video calls. I noticed the burn on your wrist you never mentioned. I noticed, this whole week, every small thing about this apartment that had changed while I was gone and every small thing that hadn't. That's not indifference. That's just — how deeply I pay attention to you. It's the only way I know how to say it, most of the time."
You felt something in your chest go warm and full and a little overwhelmed, the quiet accumulated proof of the last five days finally arriving at its plain, unguarded conclusion — that his silence had never meant less feeling. It had simply meant a different shape of it, careful and precise and entirely, thoroughly his own.
"I love you too," you said, quiet, the words feeling, somehow, inadequate to the scale of what the last few days had taught you, and yet exactly right anyway. "Loudly or quietly. However you need to hear it."
"Quietly's fine," he said, a small, rare smile touching his mouth in the dim light. "I've gotten good at hearing you either way."
He pulled you closer then, tucking you securely against his chest with the same unhurried, deliberate care he brought to everything, and you lay there together in the quiet dark of an apartment that finally, after four long months, felt entirely lived in again — not just by two people scattered across a screen and a time difference, but by the plain, steady, undeniable fact of him, home, exactly where he'd always meant to come back to.
"Kiyoomi."
"Mm."
"Don't go anywhere for a while."
"I've got three weeks before the next camp," he said, quiet, pressing a slow kiss to the top of your head. "Three whole weeks. I intend to spend every single one of them exactly like this."
"Clingy?"
"Clingy," he agreed, without a trace of embarrassment, arms tightening around you in the dark. "I've decided I don't mind the word anymore. Not if it means this."
You smiled against his chest, letting yourself settle fully into the quiet, steady warmth of him, and thought, distantly, before sleep finally pulled you under, that this — the small, undramatic, deeply felt fact of him simply being there, noticing everything, saying so little and meaning so much — was exactly the kind of love you'd wanted all along, even before you'd known enough to ask for it by name.
Hinata Shouyou × Reader | Haikyuu!! | Timeskip | Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Slice of Life
Word Count: ~8,700
Summary:Hinata Shouyou has never understood why people wait for huge milestones before celebrating. To him, finally replying to a scary email, leaving the house on a difficult day, folding the laundry that's been sitting untouched for weeks, or simply getting out of bed are victories just as worthy of applause as winning a championship. While you dismiss every small accomplishment as "the bare minimum," Hinata insists on celebrating each one with unwavering enthusiasm—until, little by little, you begin to see yourself through his eyes. A story about quiet growth, unconditional love, and learning that every step forward deserves to be celebrated.
Warnings: Comfort-focused fluff, established relationship, self-doubt, low self-esteem, brief mentions of difficult mental health days (non-graphic), emotional reassurance, healthy communication, lots of cheering, forehead kisses, hugs, supportive boyfriend Hinata, and an overwhelming amount of wholesome encouragement. Happy ending.
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"Sorry," you said, not quite meeting his eyes, already halfway to shrugging the whole thing off before he could make it into something bigger than it was. "It wasn't even a big deal."
Hinata looked up from where he was lacing his shoes by the door, head tilting in that particular way that meant he was about to ask a question you weren't ready for. "What wasn't?"
"I finally replied to that email. The one from my old supervisor. I've had it sitting there for like three weeks." You gestured vaguely at your laptop, still open on the kitchen table, the reply you'd agonized over for twenty minutes finally sent an hour ago. "It's whatever. It's the bare minimum. I should've done it weeks ago."
You expected him to nod along, maybe tease you gently for the delay, and move on to whatever came next — dinner, a show, the ordinary shape of an ordinary evening. That was, generally, how these things went. You said something small and dismissive about yourself, and the world, reasonably, let it pass.
Hinata did not let it pass.
He straightened up from his shoes with a gasp so dramatic you actually flinched, hand flying to his own chest like you'd just told him something devastating.
"...What do you mean that's not worth celebrating?"
"Hinata—"
But he was already moving, already crossing the kitchen with the frantic, delighted energy of a man who had just been handed excellent news, and before you could stop him he was clapping — actual applause, loud and enthusiastic, directed entirely at you standing there in yesterday's sweatpants holding a laptop.
"Hinata, oh my god—"
"EVERYONE!" he shouted, apparently to the empty apartment, because there was, in fact, no one else there to hear him. "THEY FINALLY SENT THE EMAIL!"
You buried your face in your hands, laughing despite yourself, mortified in the specific way that came from being celebrated for something you were fairly sure didn't warrant it. "There's no one here, Shouyou. You're announcing it to the refrigerator."
"The refrigerator needs to know too!" He turned, entirely serious, addressing the appliance directly. "She did it! After three weeks!"
"Stop—"
"I'm not stopping." He came back to you, still grinning, catching both your hands in his before you could hide behind the laptop screen again. "This is a big deal."
"It's not. It's literally just an email."
"Yesterday you couldn't even look at it," he said, and something in his voice shifted, just slightly, from the exaggerated cheer into something steadier, more sincere. "You told me that. Remember? You said you opened it and closed it four times without reading past the first line."
"...Yeah."
"Today you read it. And you answered it. That's improvement." He squeezed your hands, gentle now, the earlier theatrics fading into something quieter and more earnest. "Why wouldn't I celebrate that?"
You didn't have an immediate answer for that, something warm and a little unsteady rising in your chest at the plain, uncomplicated logic of it — logic that made sense when he said it, in a way it never quite did when the thought came from inside your own head instead.
"Because it's small," you said finally, quiet. "Compared to other things people do. It doesn't feel like it should count."
"It counts," Hinata said, simple and certain, the same tone he used when he was completely sure of something on the court — a read, a set, a play he trusted without question. "Every little victory counts. That's kind of the whole point."
You laughed about it, at first — the sheer, ridiculous enthusiasm of the moment, Hinata literally cheering at your kitchen appliances over an email — and told yourself it was just Hinata being Hinata, the same boundless energy he brought to everything, briefly redirected toward you instead of a volleyball court.
You didn't realize, not yet, that it was going to become a pattern.
It started small. You washed your hair on a day you almost didn't, and he high-fived you in the hallway with such genuine delight that you found yourself laughing instead of feeling self-conscious about needing the high-five at all. You finished your coffee — just finished it, the whole cup, on a morning you'd usually let go cold and half-full on the counter — and he pumped his fist and said, entirely too loud for eight in the morning, "LET'S GOOOOO."
You went outside on a day you hadn't planned to leave the apartment at all, just a short walk to the corner store and back, and came home to find him waiting with his shoes already on.
"Ice cream," he announced, like it was obvious. "You went outside. We're celebrating."
"Hinata, I bought milk. That's it. That's the whole outing."
"You left the apartment," he said, entirely unmoved by your protest, already steering you back out the door. "That counts. Come on, the place on the corner has the mango flavor you like."
You finished a chapter of a book you'd been stuck on for two weeks, and he declared it movie night with the same solemnity most people reserved for actual milestones. You survived a Monday that had, by any objective measure, been a genuinely terrible day — a long shift, a headache, an argument with a coworker that left you drained and short-tempered by the time you got home — and he met you at the door with a slice of the cake from the bakery you loved, no occasion attached beyond the day itself having simply been hard and survived.
"I didn't do anything today," you said, staring at the cake, exhausted and a little baffled. "I just got through it."
"That's the win," Hinata said, simple, setting the plate down in front of you. "Getting through it. Some days that's the whole job."
He treated every small step like you'd just won nationals — genuine, unguarded, entirely without irony — and it took you weeks to fully understand that he meant every single bit of it.
It was around then that you noticed he did it for himself too.
You came home one evening to find him practically vibrating by the door, still in his practice gear, bag half-dropped on the floor like he hadn't been able to wait long enough to set it down properly.
"I finally nailed that receive today!" he announced, before you'd even gotten your shoes off. "The low one, off the line shot, the one Coach has been on me about for weeks — I got it clean, three times in a row!"
"That's amazing, Shouyou."
"I know!" He looked, in that moment, exactly as delighted as he had cheering for your email, no scale to it, no sense that his own small win mattered less just because it was his. "It's not even a game situation, it's just practice, but it's been bugging me for so long, and today it just — clicked."
You realized, watching him recount it, animated and glowing, that this was simply how he moved through the world — not a philosophy applied selectively to you, but the whole, consistent shape of how he understood progress, for himself just as much as for anyone he loved.
"We should celebrate," you said, and meant it, something warm rising in your chest at the chance to hand a little of it back to him. "Come on. Get changed. I'm buying you ramen."
"Yeah?" His whole face lit up further, if that was even possible.
"Yeah. You've been chasing that receive for weeks. That's worth ramen." You bumped his shoulder, smiling. "Consider this me learning from the best."
He grinned, wide and a little bashful, ears going faintly pink in a way that told you he hadn't quite expected the gesture turned back on him, however obvious it should have been by now. "You're getting good at this."
"I had a good teacher," you said, echoing words you didn't yet know you'd repeat again, later, in a different kitchen, on a different night.
The embarrassment came before the understanding did.
"Hinata, stop," you said, one evening, after he'd clapped for you finishing a load of laundry that had been sitting, unfolded, in a basket by your bed for the better part of two weeks. "It's embarrassing."
"Why?"
"Because it's literally nothing. Everyone does laundry. It's not an achievement, it's just — living. Basic functioning."
He tilted his head at you, the same considering tilt from that first night with the email, and set the shirt he'd been folding down on the bed between you.
"Nothing?" he repeated, like he was turning the word over, testing whether it actually fit. "You told me last week you'd been staring at that basket every night for two weeks and couldn't make yourself touch it. That it felt too big, somehow, even though it was just laundry."
"...Yeah."
"So today you did something that was hard for you." He said it plainly, the way he said most things that mattered to him — without decoration, without hesitation, just the straightforward truth as he understood it. "That's something. It doesn't matter if it looks small from the outside. It mattered to you. That's enough for me."
You sat with that for a long moment, the shirt in your own hands forgotten, something in his simple, unwavering logic working its way past the reflexive shame you'd carried into the conversation.
"Doesn't it get exhausting?" you asked, quieter now. "Celebrating all of it? The little stuff?"
"No." He said it without hesitation, sitting down beside you on the bed, close enough that his shoulder brushed yours. "I like celebrating you. All of it. The big stuff and the little stuff. Especially the little stuff, honestly, because that's the stuff nobody else notices. Nobody throws a parade for finishing your coffee. Doesn't mean it wasn't hard some days."
"That's a very Hinata way of looking at it."
"Probably," he agreed, easy, smiling at you in the low evening light. "Want to hear something?"
You nodded, and he shifted slightly, something softer crossing his expression, the kind of open, unguarded look he wore when he was about to tell you something that mattered to him.
"When I finally received my first clean set from Kageyama," he said, "back in high school — my first year, I mean, before we really clicked as partners — it wasn't even a good set. Not by any real standard. It was just clean enough for me to actually hit it properly for the first time. That's it. That's the whole achievement." A small, private smile crossed his face, half memory, half something warmer. "But everyone on the team celebrated. Daichi, Suga, everyone. Because they knew what it took to get there. To someone watching from outside, it probably looked tiny. Barely worth mentioning. But to me—" he paused, searching for the right words, "—it changed everything. It was the first proof that all the work actually meant something. That it was building toward something real."
"That's different, though. That was volleyball. This is just—"
"It's not different," he said, gentle but firm, taking your hand in his. "Small victories become big victories. That's just how growth works, in volleyball or anywhere else. Nobody goes straight from struggling to thriving. It happens one little step at a time, and every single one of those steps deserves to be noticed. Especially by the person standing next to you while you take them."
You didn't have an answer for that, not right away, something in his certainty settling deep and warm in your chest, unraveling some old, tired belief you'd carried for years — that only the big things counted, that anything smaller than triumph wasn't worth acknowledging at all.
The turning point came on a day that gave you nothing to celebrate at all.
You woke up heavy, the kind of heavy that had no clear cause and no easy fix, the kind that made even simple things — showering, eating, answering a single text — feel like tasks assigned to someone else's body. You didn't get out of bed until well past noon. You didn't finish anything. You didn't reply to the one message that had been sitting unread on your phone since morning. By the time evening came, you lay curled on the couch, exhausted by a day that had, by any objective measure, accomplished absolutely nothing, and braced yourself for the quiet disappointment you were sure was coming.
Hinata came home to find you like that, and you watched him take in the state of the apartment — the blinds still drawn, the day's clear absence of anything resembling productivity — and waited for the enthusiasm from every other day to falter, just this once, into something more like concern, or worse, quiet disappointment.
Instead, he crossed the room without a word and sat down beside you on the couch, close, his hand finding yours where it rested limp against the cushion.
"Rough day?" he asked, gentle.
"I didn't do anything," you said, voice thin. "Nothing at all. I didn't even answer Yui's text. I just — existed. All day."
He was quiet for a moment, thumb tracing slow, absent circles against the back of your hand.
"You got out of bed," he said finally.
"Barely. Just to get to the couch."
"Still counts." He shifted closer, pulling you gently against his side, and you went without resistance, too tired to do anything else. "That's today's win. Getting up. Making it to the couch instead of staying in bed all day. Some days that's genuinely the whole thing, and it's enough."
"That feels like you're just making up a reason to celebrate nothing."
"I'm not making anything up." His voice stayed steady, certain, no trace of performance in it now, none of the exaggerated cheer from the email or the laundry or the coffee — just plain, quiet sincerity. "I know today felt like nothing happened. But you were still here. You still made it through, even if it didn't feel like much. That matters to me. Even on the days you don't accomplish a single thing you'd put on a list."
You felt something in your chest crack open at that, tears rising before you could stop them, and he didn't try to fix it or rush you past it — just held you closer, steady and unhurried, letting you cry against his shoulder for a day that had given you nothing and somehow, in his hands, still counted for something.
"I don't understand how you do that," you said eventually, voice thick. "Find something worth celebrating even in the worst days."
"Because there's always something," he said, simple. "Even if it's just that you're still here. That's not nothing. That's never nothing."
Months passed, the small celebrations becoming so ordinary a part of your life together that you'd stopped noticing them as anything remarkable at all — just the shape of loving Hinata Shouyou, who cheered for coffee cups and grocery runs and Mondays survived with the same unwavering sincerity he brought to everything that mattered to him.
And then something genuinely huge happened.
The promotion came through on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, an email you actually opened immediately this time, reading it twice before the reality of it fully landed — the title, the raise, the culmination of two years of work you'd sometimes doubted would ever amount to anything.
You called him before you'd even fully processed it yourself, and by the time he got home that evening, your friends and family had already flooded your phone with congratulations, warm and generous and entirely deserved.
But it was Hinata's reaction, when he walked through the door and you told him properly, that undid you completely.
He froze for half a second, processing it, and then the whole apartment seemed to shake with the force of his excitement — shouting, actual jumping, pulling you into a hug that lifted you clean off the ground before setting you down and doing it all over again, cheering loud enough that you were fairly certain your neighbors could hear every word.
"I KNEW IT," he shouted, spinning you around the kitchen with genuine, uncontainable joy. "I knew you could do it, I KNEW it—"
You were laughing, breathless, caught up entirely in the force of his celebration, and it was only afterward — sitting together on the couch, his arm around you, both of you still catching your breath from the sheer physical exuberance of his reaction — that something quiet and clarifying settled into place.
He looked exactly as excited right now, celebrating the biggest achievement of your professional life, as he had the day you'd finally answered one scary email months ago.
The exact same volume. The exact same joy. Nothing scaled up, nothing held back for the bigger occasion, no sense that this finally warranted the full force of his enthusiasm in a way the smaller things hadn't.
"Hinata," you said, quiet, something in your chest going soft and full and a little overwhelmed. "You're celebrating this exactly the same way you celebrated the email."
"Should I be celebrating it differently?" He looked at you, genuinely puzzled by the observation, like the idea of scaling his joy to match the achievement had never once occurred to him.
"No," you said, slow, understanding arriving in full now. "No, I don't think you should."
Because that was it, wasn't it — the whole quiet truth of the last several months laid bare in a single, simple realization. To him, every version of you had deserved celebration. Not just the successful one, standing here now with a promotion and a raise and every external marker of achievement the world recognized. The exhausted one too. The one who couldn't get out of bed. The one who stared at an email for three weeks before finally opening it. The one who cried on the couch over a day that felt like nothing. Every single one of those versions had been met with the same full, unguarded joy, because to Hinata Shouyou, growth wasn't a straight line reserved for the finish — it was every single step along the way, each one just as worthy of celebration as the last.
"You've been celebrating me this whole time," you said, quiet, something thick in your throat. "Not just the good days. All of it."
"Of course," he said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world, pulling you closer against his side. "Why would I only show up for the easy parts?"
It was weeks later, on an entirely unremarkable evening, that you finally understood the full shape of what he'd been building in you the whole time.
You came home with the week's groceries, nothing special about the trip at all — bread, eggs, the vegetables you'd been meaning to buy since last weekend — and set the bags down on the counter with an ordinary, unthinking sense of satisfaction.
And then, without meaning to, without even quite noticing you were doing it, you grinned.
"I did it," you said, mostly to yourself, mostly just because it felt good to say out loud — the whole mundane, unremarkable errand suddenly worth a small, private moment of pride.
Hinata, catching the tail end of it from the living room, was already on his feet, both arms thrown triumphantly into the air before you'd even finished the sentence.
"I KNEW YOU COULD!" he shouted, delighted, crossing the kitchen to catch you in another one of his enthusiastic, lifting hugs.
You rolled your eyes, laughing, the familiar, ridiculous joy of it settling warm through your chest same as it always did.
But this time — for the first time, you realized, since all of this had started — you were already smiling before he'd even started cheering. Not because he'd told you it counted. Not because his enthusiasm had convinced you, in the moment, to feel proud of something you'd otherwise have dismissed.
Because somewhere along the way, quietly, without you ever quite noticing it happen, you'd started celebrating yourself too.
"You're doing the thing," Hinata said, pulling back slightly to look at you, something soft and delighted crossing his face at whatever he saw there.
"What thing?"
"Smiling. Before I even said anything." He grinned, wide and unguarded, pressing a quick kiss to your forehead. "I love that. I love watching you figure out you're allowed to be proud of yourself."
"I had a good teacher," you said, quiet, leaning into him.
"Nah." He shook his head, easy and certain, wrapping both arms around you properly now. "You did the work. I just made sure somebody was cheering while you did it."
You smiled before you realized you were doing it. Maybe that was the biggest victory of all.
Summary:A harmless gift from Suna—a limited-edition Luffy plushie won after far too many failed claw machine attempts—quickly becomes your favorite possession. What starts as an inside joke slowly turns into Suna's greatest (and most embarrassing) rival as the plushie earns a permanent place in your bed, your texts, and your daily life. When even the famously unbothered Suna Rintarou finds himself competing with a stuffed pirate for your attention, he realizes that maybe... just maybe... he is capable of getting jealous after all.
Warnings: Pure fluff and comedy. Established relationship, playful teasing, jealous Suna, light possessiveness, cuddling, kisses, One Piece references, and one very innocent rivalry between a professional volleyball player and a plushie. Happy ending.
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Suna Rintarou was not a jealous person. At least, that's what he'd have told you if you'd asked him a month ago. He didn't get worked up over much of anything — not over Atsumu's teasing, not over losing at Mario Kart, not even over Osamu eating the last onigiri he'd been saving for after practice. He drifted through most of life with the same half-lidded, unbothered expression, like nothing was worth the energy of caring loudly.
So when he found himself standing in your kitchen at eleven at night, arms crossed, staring down a stuffed Luffy plushie like it had personally wronged him, he had to admit — something had gone very wrong.
It had started innocently enough. Three weeks ago, Suna had seen the plushie in a claw machine at the arcade near your apartment. It wasn't even that good a machine — the kind that ate your money and gave you nothing back, rigged within an inch of its life. But he'd dropped in coin after coin, ignoring Osamu's increasingly loud sighs beside him, until finally, on his ninth try, the claw actually gripped instead of slipping, and out came a slightly lopsided, extremely soft Luffy doll with stitched-on sunglasses that didn't come with the original design — some limited edition variant you'd mentioned wanting, off-hand, weeks before, in a conversation Suna hadn't even seemed to be paying attention to.
That was the thing about Suna. He always seemed like he wasn't paying attention. And then he'd go and prove that he'd caught every single word.
"Here," he'd said, tossing it into your lap without ceremony, like it was nothing, like he hadn't spent forty minutes and way too many coins on it. "You wouldn't shut up about it."
You'd nearly tackled him. You definitely squealed loud enough that he'd winced and told you to quiet down, the neighbors were going to think he was hurting you. But even as he complained, there'd been that small, satisfied curl at the corner of his mouth — the one he only got when something had gone exactly the way he wanted.
You'd known his name immediately, obviously — Luffy, straw hat and all, if a little lopsided from the stitching. From that day forward, Luffy had a permanent spot on your bed, propped against your pillows like some kind of straw-hatted sentinel.
Suna hadn't thought anything of it. Not at first.
The problem, if you could call it that, started small. You'd taken a picture of the plushie sitting on your windowsill in the afternoon light and sent it to him with the caption he's living his best life. Suna had smiled at his phone like an idiot on the train home, which Osamu had mercilessly clocked and would not let him live down for the rest of the week.
Then you started giving the thing a personality. "Luffy says good morning," you'd text. Or, during a particularly boring class, "Luffy is judging me for not studying." Suna found it funny. Endearing, even. He liked that something he'd given you had become a whole bit between you two.
But then it kept going. And going.
You started sleeping with it. Which — fine. Normal. People slept with stuffed animals. Suna had definitely still had a beat-up old cat plushie somewhere in his closet that he was never, ever going to admit to owning. But then you mentioned, completely offhand, over a phone call one night, that you'd started talking to it before bed. "Just to like — process the day," you said, laughing a little. "Don't judge me."
"I'm not judging you," Suna said, even though something in his chest had pulled tight in a way he didn't have a name for yet.
"Good. Because Luffy is a great listener. Better than some people." A pause. "No offense."
"...None taken," Suna said, in a voice that suggested offense had, in fact, been taken.
He told himself it was ridiculous. He was a nineteen-year-old man getting weird about a stuffed pirate. There was no version of this where he came out looking normal, and he knew that, and yet the feeling didn't go away — it just sort of sat there, low and stupid, every time you brought the plushie up like it was a third party in the relationship.
Things came to a head on a night he'd come over to study — or that was the plan, anyway, before you'd both given up on productivity within twenty minutes and ended up sprawled on your bed, half-watching something neither of you were really following. Luffy, as always, held his post against the pillows.
At some point you shifted, curling slightly into Suna's side, and grabbed the plushie to hug against your chest, sighing contentedly. "Best cuddle buddy," you murmured, patting its head.
Suna, who had been in the middle of getting comfortable himself, stopped.
"I'm right here," he said.
"I know." You didn't even look up. "You can both be my cuddle buddies. It's not a competition."
"It's a stuffed animal."
"He has a name."
"He's made of polyester."
"Rude," you said, hugging the plushie tighter, like you were protecting it from him. "Don't talk about Luffy like that in front of him."
Suna stared at you. Stared at the plushie. Felt, with a rising and deeply humiliating clarity, that he was — somehow, impossibly — losing an argument to a stuffed pirate.
"You know I bought that thing," he said.
"I know."
"I spent actual money on it. Multiple times. The claw kept dropping it."
"I know, and it was very romantic," you said, entirely too sincerely for someone who was still hugging the plushie instead of him. "That's why he's earned his spot."
"His spot," Suna repeated flatly.
"Yeah. Right here." You patted the space between you and the plushie, which, Suna noted with some indignation, was closer to you than he currently was.
He didn't say anything else. He just reached over, plucked the plushie out of your arms with the same unbothered efficiency he did everything, and set it down on the nightstand, facing the wall.
"Hey—"
"He can watch the movie from over there," Suna said, resettling himself against you, arm looping around your waist like he was reclaiming territory. "Or not. I don't really care what he does."
You were laughing now, delighted, propping yourself up on one elbow to look at him properly. "Suna. Are you seriously jealous of a plushie."
"No."
"You just turned him around so he couldn't look at us."
"He doesn't have eyes that work. It doesn't matter which way he's facing."
"Oh my god." You were grinning so wide it had to hurt. "You are. You're jealous of Luffy."
"I'm not saying anything else about this," Suna said, which was, in itself, a confession, and you both knew it.
He tried to play it off over the next few days. That was the Suna way — deflect, downplay, pretend the moment had never happened and hope it got buried under enough time and unrelated conversations that nobody brought it up again. It worked on most people. It did not work on you, because you had apparently decided that Suna Rintarou being quietly, absurdly jealous of a stuffed animal was the funniest thing that had happened to you all year, and you were not going to let it go.
You brought Luffy everywhere, suddenly. Not really — you weren't actually carrying a plushie around campus like a lunatic — but every text became an opportunity. A picture of the plushie "helping" you study, propped up next to your notes. A picture of it wearing one of your hair scrunchies like a headband. A message that read, simply, Luffy says hi with no further context, sent right in the middle of Suna's practice, so that he had to read it standing on the court with Osamu leaning over his shoulder asking who Luffy was and why Suna's ears had gone red.
"It's nothing," Suna muttered, shoving his phone back in his bag.
"Doesn't look like nothing," Osamu said, entirely too pleased with himself. "You're the color of a tomato, Rin."
"I will end you."
"Who's Luffy?"
"I said I will end you."
Osamu, naturally, told Atsumu. Atsumu, naturally, would not shut up about it for the rest of the week, cackling every time he caught Suna glancing at his phone, asking loudly across the club room whether "the plushie boyfriend" was doing okay, whether Suna needed to fight a stuffed animal for his honor. Suna endured it with the long-suffering patience of a man who had brought this entirely upon himself and knew it.
It was you, in the end, who put a stop to it — mostly because even you had limits on how long you could tease him before it stopped being funny and started being mean, and you liked him too much to actually make him miserable over it.
You showed up at his apartment on a Friday evening with the plushie tucked under one arm, and when he opened the door and saw it, his expression did something complicated and resigned, like he was bracing for another week of this.
"Relax," you said, stepping past him inside. "I come bearing peace offerings."
"You brought the enemy into my own home."
"He's not the enemy. He's actually here to help you." You set the plushie down on Suna's couch, propped upright, facing the two of you. "Luffy, as official witness — Suna Rintarou, you are, and have always been, my favorite. Not a stuffed animal. Not anyone. You. I just thought it was really funny watching you get worked up about it, so I kept going. That's it. That's the whole thing."
Suna looked at you. Looked at the plushie. Something in his shoulders that had been quietly tense for the better part of two weeks finally eased.
"You did that on purpose," he said. "This whole time."
"Obviously. You should've seen your face at practice. Osamu sent me a video."
"He what—"
"Focus," you said, laughing, stepping closer and looping your arms around his neck before he could spiral into another rant about Osamu's betrayal. "I like you an unreasonable amount, Suna. Way more than a stuffed pirate that I asked you to win me as a joke, and that you then spent forty minutes and probably ten dollars in quarters trying to get."
"Twelve dollars," Suna corrected, arms settling automatically around your waist, some of the sharpness draining out of his voice now that he had you instead of an empty apartment and a green-eyed grudge against felt and stuffing. "I counted."
"Twelve dollars," you agreed. "Which is genuinely the most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me, so. I'm sorry I turned it into a bit for two weeks."
"You're not sorry."
"I'm a little sorry."
"You're not even a little sorry."
"Okay, I'm not sorry at all," you admitted, grinning up at him. "But I really do like you more than the plushie. For the record."
Suna huffed something that was almost a laugh, tipping his forehead down against yours. "You'd better. I have a reputation to protect. Osamu already thinks I proposed to a stuffed animal."
"You kind of did, a little."
"I'm breaking up with both of you."
"You can't break up with a plushie, Rintarou, he's not your girlfriend."
"He's got more screen time in your texts than I do, so I'm not sure that's true anymore."
You laughed again, pressing up to kiss the corner of his mouth, and whatever was left of his sulking dissolved entirely. Behind you, forgotten now on the couch, Luffy sat propped against the cushions, permanently smiling, permanently oblivious to the chaos he'd caused — a twelve-dollar rubber-armed reminder that even someone as unbothered as Suna Rintarou could, apparently, be brought entirely undone by something as small as watching you love a gift more than you loved bragging about the person who gave it to you.
He decided, privately, that he didn't mind so much. As long as he still came first.
Which, obviously, he did. Even if it had taken him an embarrassingly long two weeks and one entire volleyball team's worth of teasing to actually believe it.
Sugawara Koushi × Reader | Haikyuu!! | Timeskip | Second Chance Romance | Reunion, Angst to Fluff
Word Count: ~3,700
Summary:
Six years after a graduation confession that was met with silence, you and Sugawara Koushi unexpectedly reunite at a volleyball gathering organized by old friends. What he believed was an unrequited first love—and what you believed was a chance forever lost—turns out to be nothing more than two frightened hearts that never stopped loving each other. Sometimes, the words that take the longest to say are the ones worth waiting for.
Warnings: Happy ending. Second chance romance, mutual pining, reunion, emotional vulnerability, crying, love confessions, first kiss, friends-to-lovers, supportive teammates, humor, comfort, and tooth-rotting fluff.
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He'd said it quietly.
That was the detail that stayed with you longest, in all the years that followed — not the words themselves, though you remembered those too, word for word, in the exact soft cadence he'd used. It was the quiet of it. Graduation day, the gymnasium behind you still faintly echoing with the noise of the ceremony, the two of you standing off to the side near the bike racks where you'd always used to talk after practice, and he'd said it like he was afraid saying it any louder might break something.
"I think I've been in love with you for a while now," he'd said, hands shoved in his pockets, refusing to quite meet your eyes even as he said it. "I didn't want to leave without telling you. Didn't seem fair. To either of us."
You remembered the way your chest had gone tight and full all at once, too many feelings arriving too fast to sort through in the handful of seconds you had before he kept talking, softer still, like he was already bracing for you not to say it back.
"You don't have to say anything," he'd said. "I just wanted you to know. Before we go our separate ways."
And then, because you were eighteen and terrified and entirely unprepared for the size of what he'd just handed you, you hadn't said anything at all. You'd just stood there, feeling the moment slip past you in real time, and by the time you'd found your voice again he'd already smiled — small, a little sad, entirely understanding in the specific way Sugawara Koushi was always, infuriatingly, understanding — and told you to have a good life, and walked away toward his family waiting by the gate.
You told yourself, for years afterward, that you'd simply been too slow. That the words had been right there, and you'd let the moment close over them before you could get them out. It became a small, private ache you carried through university, through your first real job, through the slow scattering of everyone you'd once known into separate cities and separate lives — the specific regret of a thing almost said, and never quite recovered.
You didn't see him again for six years.
The reunion had been Bokuto's idea, which surprised absolutely no one who knew him. He'd apparently spent the better part of a year lobbying every group chat he had access to — old teammates, old rivals, anyone who'd ever shared a gym floor with him during those years — until the sheer force of his enthusiasm had actually produced a real event: a full weekend at a lakeside venue, half training camp reunion and half open invitation, drawing in players and managers alike from Karasuno, Nekoma, Fukurodani, Inarizaki, rosters mixed in among them now that so many of the players had gone pro.
You'd almost said no. You told yourself it was because your schedule was too full, because the drive was long, because you'd lost touch with most of that world once volleyball had stopped being the center of your daily life. The truth, which you admitted to yourself only reluctantly, somewhere around the third excuse you'd drafted and deleted, was that you weren't sure you were ready to see him.
You went anyway. Kiyoko convinced you, in the end, with a single text that read simply: You'll regret it more if you don't come. Trust me. You trusted her. You always had.
The venue was loud before you even reached the door — familiar loud, the specific chaos of dozens of people who'd once shared locker rooms and bus rides and years of shared exhaustion, now grown into adults who still, apparently, greeted each other by tackling one another in doorways. You spotted Bokuto almost immediately, hollering something at Kuroo across the room, and Yaku standing nearby with the particular long-suffering expression of a man who'd spent years managing exactly this kind of chaos and had never quite gotten used to it.
"You made it," Kiyoko said, appearing at your side with Asahi trailing a step behind her, both of them looking, you thought, exactly as gentle and steady as they always had. "I'm glad. Daichi's around here somewhere. And—" she paused, something careful entering her expression, "—Suga's here too. Just so you're not caught off guard."
Your stomach dropped, pleasantly and terribly, all at once. "Right. Of course he is."
"You don't have to talk to him if you're not ready," Kiyoko said, gentle, watching you with the same quiet perceptiveness she'd always had, the kind that used to catch every small crisis on the team before anyone else noticed it brewing. "But for what it's worth — I don't think either of you ever really got over it. Whatever happened at graduation."
"How do you know something happened at graduation?"
"Because I watched you both for three years before that," Kiyoko said, simply, a small, knowing smile touching her mouth. "I have eyes, you know."
You saw him for the first time near the drinks table, laughing at something Daichi had said, and the sight of him hit you with more force than you'd braced for despite the entire drive over spent trying to prepare yourself for exactly this moment.
He looked older, obviously — the boyish softness of eighteen replaced by something steadier, more settled, though the easy warmth of his expression hadn't changed at all, nor had the particular way he tilted his head when something genuinely amused him. He was still, unmistakably, the same person who'd you once made laugh so hard during a losing match that you'd nearly gotten thrown out of the gym for disrupting the other team's serve.
He saw you a moment later, and everything about him went suddenly, completely still.
"Hey," Daichi said, glancing between the two of you with the dawning realization of a man who'd just walked into something he probably should have anticipated, "I'm going to go find Asahi," and made a hasty, diplomatic exit that neither of you noticed, both too caught in the sudden, charged silence of finally standing in the same room again after six years apart.
"Hi," Suga said finally, his voice doing the thing it had always done when he was nervous — going soft and slightly higher, carefully controlled. "It's — you look really good."
"So do you." Your own voice came out unsteady, and you hated it, hated how quickly six years of careful distance had collapsed the moment you'd actually seen his face. "I didn't know if you'd be here."
"Bokuto's very persuasive." A small, familiar smile, the same one from graduation day, though there was something more careful behind it now. "I almost didn't come."
"Me too."
"Yeah?" Something flickered across his face — hope, maybe, or something more cautious than hope, the particular guarded look of a man who'd learned, the hard way, not to expect too much. "Why's that?"
You should have had an answer ready. You'd had six years to prepare one, and standing there in front of him now, every carefully rehearsed explanation dissolved into nothing, leaving only the plain, unguarded truth.
"Because I didn't know if I could face you," you said, quiet. "After graduation. After everything I didn't say."
Something shifted in his expression, careful and searching. "You don't have to explain anything. It was a long time ago. We were kids."
"I want to explain it, though." You took a breath, steadying yourself, aware, distantly, that a few of your old teammates had started to notice the two of you standing apart from the rest of the party, Kiyoko's careful, encouraging gaze catching yours from across the room. "I've thought about that day for six years, Koushi. About everything I should have said and didn't."
He led you, wordlessly, out toward the lake — away from the noise of the reunion, down a quiet path lined with early evening light, the sound of the party fading gently behind you until it was just the two of you and the soft lapping of water against the shore.
He sat first, and you settled beside him, close but not quite touching, the old careful distance from graduation day reasserting itself despite six years of separation. For a while neither of you said anything at all. He picked at a loose thread on his sleeve. You watched a duck paddle past, absurdly grateful for something to look at that wasn't his face.
"I thought I'd gotten over it," he said finally, still not looking at you, voice quieter than it had been at the drinks table. "Genuinely. I told myself, for a long time, that it was just a teenage thing. First love. The kind of thing you're supposed to grow out of."
"Did you? Grow out of it?"
"No." He said it simply, without hesitation, looking out at the water rather than at you, his hands twisting together in his lap. "I dated other people. Tried to, anyway. There was someone, second year of university — nice girl, she liked me a lot, I think I convinced myself I did too for about eight months. Didn't work. None of it worked, because I kept comparing everyone to—" he stopped, shook his head slightly, dragged a hand down his face. "Sorry. It doesn't matter. The point is that I thought I'd buried it well enough that I could see you again today and just be fine. Friendly. Normal."
"And?"
"And then I saw you across the room and every single thing I'd told myself for six years fell apart in about four seconds." He let out a short, unsteady laugh, dragging a hand through his hair, and you felt your own chest tighten at the raw honesty of it, so different from the careful, quiet confession he'd offered at graduation. "I'm sorry. This isn't — I didn't mean to just say all that immediately. I don't want to make this weird for you."
"You're not making it weird." Your voice came out thick, and you realized, distantly, that your eyes had started to sting. You pressed the back of your hand against your mouth for a second, willing yourself to get through this without falling apart before you'd even said it. "Koushi, I need to tell you something, and I need you to actually let me finish this time, because I didn't manage it six years ago and I've regretted it every single day since."
He turned to look at you fully then, something careful and hopeful and afraid all at once in his expression, and waited, hands going still in his lap like he didn't trust himself to move.
"You told me you loved me at graduation," you said, voice unsteady now, the words coming slower than you'd rehearsed them in your head over six years, catching and starting again more than once, "and I froze. Not because — I didn't — god, this is harder to say than I thought it would be." You stopped, took a breath, tried again. "I felt the same way. I'd felt it for months before that. And I was so scared of how big it was that I couldn't get a single word out before you'd already smiled and walked away. I told myself for years that I'd just been too slow. That the moment had closed before I could catch it. But the truth is—" your voice cracked, and you had to stop again, blinking hard, "—the truth is I loved you. I loved you so much it terrified me, and I let that fear cost me the only chance I had to tell you."
The words hung between you, raw and unpracticed despite six years of imagining exactly this conversation, and you watched his face crumble, slowly, into something you'd never seen on him before — not the easy, steady warmth he usually wore, but something cracked open and disbelieving and hopeful all at once. His jaw worked like he was trying to find something to say and couldn't, and for a moment he just looked at you, eyes shining, one hand coming up to cover his mouth.
"You loved me," he said, finally, quiet, muffled slightly behind his own hand, like he needed to hear it stated plainly to actually believe it. "This whole time."
"This whole time," you confirmed, and felt the first tear slip free before you could stop it, then another, and you didn't bother wiping them away. "I never stopped, Koushi. I just didn't know how to say it, and then you were gone, and then it felt too late, and I told myself it was better to just let it be a memory instead of chasing something that probably wasn't there anymore."
"It was there," he said, voice breaking now too, reaching for your hand slowly, like he was giving you every chance to pull away, and when you didn't, his fingers closed around yours with a kind of careful, trembling urgency that made your own breath catch. "God, it was there the whole time. Six years, and it was just — sitting there, waiting, and I didn't even know. I didn't want to hope. It hurt too much to hope, so I convinced myself I'd moved on, and then you walked into that room tonight and I—"
He couldn't finish the sentence. His breath hitched, once, audibly, and he pressed his free hand briefly against his eyes before dropping it, giving up on composure entirely. You didn't need him to finish it. You were both crying now, openly, the six years of careful distance finally collapsing all at once into something too large and too real to hold back any longer.
Neither of you moved for a moment, just sat there with your hands joined between you, tears falling freely, the absurdity and relief of it all pulling something close to a laugh out of both of you at once. Then he reached for you properly, slow, almost hesitant, like he needed you to close the last of the distance yourself, and when you did, when you finally leaned into him, he wrapped both arms around you and held on like he'd been waiting six years for exactly the chance to do it.
You stayed like that a long while, his chin resting against the top of your head, one of his hands moving in slow, unsteady circles against your back, neither of you in any hurry to pull away. You could feel him still shaking slightly, small aftershocks of the crying neither of you had fully finished, and you held on tighter, letting the quiet stretch, letting the lake and the fading light and the distant hum of the party give you both the time you hadn't let yourselves have six years ago.
"I love you," he said eventually, into your hair, muffled and unsteady, the same words from graduation but nothing quiet about them this time, said with the full, unguarded weight of six years of missing you behind them. "I loved you then. I love you now. I don't think I ever actually stopped, no matter how hard I tried to convince myself otherwise."
"I love you too," you said, finally, the words you'd owed him for six years finally arriving, unhurried and certain and entirely too late by any reasonable measure, except that neither of you cared, not anymore, not with the whole weight of it finally spoken between you. "I should have said it back then. I'm so sorry I didn't."
"You're saying it now." He pulled back, just enough to look at you properly, his own eyes red-rimmed and still wet, and cupped your face gently in both hands, brushing the tears from your cheeks with a thumb that wasn't quite steady. "That's what matters. You're saying it now, and I'm here, and I'm not going anywhere this time."
He kissed you then, slow and careful and disbelieving, like he still couldn't quite trust that this was real, and you kissed him back with six years of unspoken feeling finally given somewhere to go, both of you still crying, both of you laughing a little too, through the tears, at the sheer overwhelming relief of finally, finally saying the thing that should have been said years ago.
When you finally broke apart, foreheads resting together, his thumbs still gently tracing your cheekbones, you became aware, gradually, of a sound behind you — a low, muffled commotion coming from the direction of the path, and turned to find, with mounting horror, an entire small crowd of your old teammates standing not nearly far enough away, watching with expressions ranging from delighted to openly emotional.
"They're KISSING," Bokuto announced, at a volume entirely unsuited to the moment, only to be immediately shushed by no fewer than four people at once.
"I told you," Kiyoko said, quiet and pleased, arm looped through Asahi's, both of them looking on with the same soft, knowing warmth they'd carried the whole evening. "Six years. I told you both, eventually."
"You were CRYING," Kuroo added, unhelpfully, wiping at his own suspiciously damp eyes. "Both of you. This is the most romantic thing I've ever witnessed and I've been to actual weddings."
"I'm not crying," Yaku said, from somewhere near the back, very obviously crying, dabbing at his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket while Lev, beside him, looked on with unrestrained delight.
"Everyone needs to leave," Suga said, mortified, though he made no actual move to release you from his arms, pulling you instead more securely against his side like he had no intention of letting a small audience interrupt what six years of waiting had finally earned. "This was a private moment."
"It was NOT private, you did it on the path where literally anyone could walk by," Tanaka pointed out, entirely reasonable and entirely unhelpful.
"Daichi, control your team," Suga called out, though there was no real heat behind it, laughter threading through the words despite his best efforts at composure.
"I have no jurisdiction over you anymore, Suga, you graduated," Daichi called back, grinning, clearly enjoying himself far too much to intervene on anyone's behalf.
You buried your face against Suga's shoulder, half laughing and half still crying, entirely overwhelmed by the sheer accumulated weight of the evening — six years of aching regret resolved, finally, in front of an audience of people who had, apparently, been rooting for exactly this the entire time.
"They've been waiting for this," you said, muffled, into his shoulder.
"Apparently everyone's been waiting for this except us," he said, pressing a slow kiss to the top of your head, warm and unhurried despite the small crowd still watching with unrestrained delight. "Kiyoko told me, once, years ago, that she thought you felt the same way. I didn't believe her. Told her I'd made my peace with just being wrong about it."
"You weren't wrong."
"No," he agreed, quiet, certain, tilting your chin up gently so he could look at you properly again, "I wasn't. Not about that. Not about you. Never about you."
He kissed you again, slower this time, unbothered now by the audience still gathered along the path, and somewhere behind you, you heard Bokuto's voice rise in another triumphant announcement, promptly drowned out by what sounded like Kuroo attempting, badly, to organize a round of applause.
"For the record," Suga murmured, against your temple, once the kiss had ended and you'd both finally turned to face the small, delighted crowd waiting to properly descend on you, "I'm never letting six years happen again. Whatever this is — however slow we need to go, however much time you need — I'm not disappearing on you a second time."
"You didn't disappear the first time," you said, gentle. "I let you walk away without a word. That was on me."
"Then we're even," he said, simple, lacing his fingers through yours as Kiyoko finally reached you both, pulling you into a fierce, tearful hug that smelled faintly of the same perfume she'd worn back in high school. "Both idiots. Both finally figured it out."
"Both finally figured it out," you agreed, and let yourself be pulled, laughing and crying in equal measure, back into the noisy, overjoyed crowd of old friends who had, apparently, never once stopped believing this exact moment would eventually arrive.
Summary:
When Ushijima quietly notices you've started giving him more space, he comes to the heartbreaking conclusion that you're preparing to leave him. The truth, however, couldn't be further from reality—you've only been trying to make his demanding volleyball season a little easier. Beneath a quiet sky full of stars, a simple misunderstanding turns into an honest conversation about love, reassurance, and learning that sometimes the people trying hardest to protect each other only need to speak their hearts aloud.
Warnings: None — comfort throughout. Established relationship, miscommunication, emotional vulnerability, reassurance, quiet conversations, rooftop stargazing, hand-holding, forehead kisses, soft confessions, mutual comfort, and a heartwarming ending.
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Ushijima Wakatoshi was not a man who noticed small things quickly. He noticed effort, technique, the exact angle of a spike or the split-second hesitation in an opponent's footwork — things that mattered on a court, things that could be trained and corrected and improved. Small, quiet shifts in a person he loved were a different kind of observation entirely, one he'd never had much practice with, and so it took him nearly three weeks to notice that something between the two of you had changed.
It wasn't anything dramatic. You hadn't argued. You hadn't said anything cutting or cold. If anything, you'd been more pleasant than usual — more patient with his schedule, more understanding when practice ran long, more willing to tell him, gently, to go rest instead of staying up to wait for him. You smiled at him the same way you always had. You still kissed him goodbye at the door each morning, still asked about his training, still sat through entire post-match breakdowns with the same genuine interest you'd always shown.
But you had stopped reaching for him first.
He noticed it properly on a Tuesday, sitting across from you at dinner, when he realized he could not remember the last time you'd initiated a conversation about your own day before he'd finished detailing his. He noticed it again on Thursday, when you offered to stay home instead of joining him for a team dinner, insisting, with an easy smile, that he should go enjoy time with his teammates without worrying about entertaining you. He noticed it most clearly on Saturday night, when he came home late from an extra training session to find you already in bed, and instead of the soft, sleepy way you usually shifted toward him when he slid in beside you, you simply murmured a quiet greeting and stayed exactly where you were, careful, considerate, giving him space he hadn't asked for and wasn't sure he wanted.
He lay awake a long time that night, turning the observations over in his mind with the same careful, methodical attention he brought to reviewing game footage, trying to identify the exact moment the shift had begun and what he might have done to cause it.
He did not, in three weeks of careful observation, arrive at the correct answer.
The wrong answer arrived instead, quiet and certain, somewhere in the following week: that you were pulling away from him. That the distance he'd been sensing was the early, careful groundwork of someone preparing to leave, softened and drawn out because you didn't want to hurt him, because you were kind enough to let him down slowly instead of all at once.
It was not, he told himself, an unreasonable conclusion. He was gone more than he was home most months. Training camps took him away for stretches at a time. Even when he was in the city, his schedule left little room for anything beyond volleyball — practice, film review, conditioning, more practice — and he was aware, in the plain, unflinching way he was aware of most difficult truths about himself, that he was not always easy to love. He did not always know what to say. He did not always remember to ask the right questions, or notice when you needed something before you had to ask for it outright. It made a certain kind of sense, turned over in the quiet of his own mind at two in the morning, that eventually the patience you'd shown him for years might simply run out.
He did not know how to ask you about it directly. Directness had never failed him on the court — a straightforward question, honestly delivered, was usually met with an honest answer — but this felt different, weighted with the possibility of an answer he wasn't prepared to hear, and so instead he did what he always did when a problem resisted his usual methods: he watched. Carefully. Patiently. Trying to gather enough information to understand the shape of what was happening before he had to confront it directly.
What he found, watching you more closely over the following days, was not what he expected.
He found you standing on the balcony most nights before bed, arms folded loosely against the railing, face tilted up toward the sky. He found you doing it after he came home late, after long silences at dinner, after the moments when he'd been most distracted and least present — not retreating from him in anger, but simply standing very still, looking up at the stars with an expression he couldn't quite read from across the room.
He watched it happen four nights in a row before he finally worked up the resolve to ask you about it directly, because whatever conclusion his careful observation had led him toward, this detail didn't fit cleanly into it, and Ushijima did not like conclusions that didn't fit the evidence.
"You look at the stars a lot," he said, one evening, joining you on the balcony without preamble, the way he approached most conversations that mattered to him — directly, without much room for softening the edges.
You glanced over at him, faintly surprised, and then smiled, easy and warm in a way that did nothing to settle the uncertainty sitting heavy in his chest. "I like the quiet. And the view's good from up here."
"You do it most nights."
"I suppose I do." You turned your gaze back up to the sky, unbothered by the observation, and he studied the line of your profile in the dim light, trying to read something in it that would explain the last several weeks.
"Wakatoshi," you said, after a moment, not looking away from the sky, "is something on your mind? You've been watching me a lot lately. More than usual."
He considered several ways to answer that, weighing each one for accuracy the way he might weigh different approaches to a difficult serve, and settled, finally, on the truth, because he had never been especially good at anything else.
"I believe you may be preparing to leave," he said.
You turned to look at him fully then, surprise breaking cleanly across your face. "What?"
"You have stopped reaching for me first," he said, laying out the evidence the same plain, methodical way he'd have laid out a scouting report. "You give me space I did not ask for. You stay home from things instead of joining me. You are patient with my schedule in a way that feels less like patience and more like — preparation. For something. I have been trying to determine what I did to cause it, so that I might correct it, but I have not been able to identify the specific failure."
For a long moment, you simply stared at him, something complicated moving across your face — surprise, then a flicker of something that looked almost like guilt, and finally, softening at the edges, something closer to gentle disbelief.
"Wakatoshi," you said, quiet, "I'm not leaving."
"You are certain?"
"Yes."
"Completely?" The word came out lower than he intended, something almost unguarded slipping through the careful, measured way he usually spoke, like some part of him had already rehearsed this exact disappointment enough times that a single reassurance wasn't quite enough to undo it.
"Completely," you said, gentle, understanding, in that moment, exactly how far his mind had already carried him down the wrong path. "I promise you, Wakatoshi. I'm not going anywhere."
He held your gaze a moment longer, searching, and only then did something in his shoulders finally ease. You reached out, taking his hand where it rested against the railing, lacing your fingers through his with the same familiar ease that had, apparently, gone unnoticed by him in every other context but this one over the last several weeks. "I've been giving you space because I love you. Not because I'm preparing to go anywhere."
He turned that over carefully, the plain contradiction of it not immediately resolving itself in his mind. "I do not understand. Space is usually given because closeness has become unwanted."
"Not always." You squeezed his hand, something soft and a little sad crossing your expression now, like you were only just realizing, in real time, how badly your intentions had translated into something else entirely. "You've had a hard season. More training, more pressure, less time than usual, and I could see it wearing on you — the schedule, the expectations, all of it. I didn't want to be one more thing pulling at your attention when you already had so little of it to spare. So I started stepping back. Giving you room to focus on what you needed to focus on, without feeling like you had to also manage me, or entertain me, or split yourself in half trying to be present for both things at once."
"You did this because you love volleyball," he said slowly, working through the logic of it, "or because you love me."
"Because I love you," you said, immediate and certain, "and because I know how much volleyball means to you, and I wanted you to have room to give it everything it needed without worrying you were failing me at the same time. That's not the same as pulling away, Wakatoshi. I've just been trying to make things easier. I didn't realize it was reading as the opposite."
Something in his chest loosened, slow and uneven, the tight, certain dread of the last week beginning to unwind into something more like disbelief at his own misreading. "I misunderstood."
"You misunderstood," you agreed, gentle, no accusation in it. "Which is sort of impressively on-brand for both of us, honestly. You noticed I was pulling back and assumed the worst instead of just asking me directly, and I was so busy trying not to be a burden that I never stopped to explain what I was actually doing. We're both a little hopeless at this."
"I should have asked sooner."
"You asked eventually. That counts for something." You smiled at him, warm despite the mess of misunderstanding sitting between you, and nodded toward the sky above the balcony. "For what it's worth — the stargazing wasn't really about missing you, either. Not exactly. It just became something I did while I was giving you room. A way to sit with my own thoughts instead of filling the space with something that might've pulled at your attention. I found I liked it. Genuinely. Not just as a substitute for you."
"I would like to understand it better," he said, quiet, "if you would show me."
You did.
He sat beside you on the balcony that night for the first time in weeks, not distracted, not half-present with his mind still turning over some drill from practice, but genuinely there, watching the sky with the same careful, focused attention he brought to a match, letting you point out the handful of constellations you actually knew and admit, with a small laugh, that you mostly just liked how quiet everything felt up here, how far away the noise of the world seemed when you tilted your head back far enough.
"Volleyball is the same, in a way," he said, after a while, surprising you with the observation. "When I am fully focused on a match, everything else becomes quiet. I did not think of it as similar to this. But I understand it a little better now."
"That's a very Ushijima way of relating to stargazing," you said, fond. "Bringing it back to volleyball."
"It is what I know," he said, simply, and you laughed, leaning your head against his shoulder, feeling him relax fully beside you for what felt like the first time in weeks — no distraction pulling at him, no schedule waiting to reclaim his attention, just the plain, unhurried fact of the two of you sitting together under a wide, quiet sky.
"I would like it," he said, after a long, comfortable silence, "if you did not give me space in that way again. Without telling me first, I mean. I do not need protecting from your presence. I need it. Even when the season is difficult. Especially then."
"Okay," you said, quiet, meaning it. "I'll tell you next time, instead of just quietly stepping back. I promise."
"Thank you." He turned to look at you, something steady and certain settling into his expression now that the uncertainty of the last several weeks had finally resolved itself into something plain and true. "I am sorry. For assuming the worst instead of simply asking."
"I'm sorry too. For making you feel like you had to assume anything at all." You reached up, brushing your thumb gently along his jaw, and felt him lean, almost imperceptibly, into the touch. "We'll do better. Both of us."
"Yes," he agreed, certain, the way he agreed to anything he'd fully committed to. "We will."
You stayed out on the balcony a long while after that, long enough that the city noise below faded into something distant and unimportant, long enough that he pointed, eventually, at a cluster of stars he was fairly sure he remembered from a childhood astronomy unit and asked, with the same careful seriousness he brought to a game plan, whether you thought it was actually the constellation he suspected or if he was simply seeing what he wanted to see.
"I have no idea," you admitted, laughing. "I just like that they're all up there. Doesn't really matter what they're called."
"I would like to learn their names properly," he said. "If you would like to learn with me."
"I'd like that a lot."
He wrapped an arm around you then, drawing you in against his side with the same steady, deliberate care he brought to everything that mattered to him, and the two of you sat together beneath the wide spread of stars for a long while longer, no misunderstanding left unspoken between you, no space where there didn't need to be any — just the quiet, settled comfort of two people who had, in their own separate and imperfect ways, been trying to love each other well the whole time, and had simply needed, finally, to say so out loud.
"Wakatoshi," you said, quiet, into the stillness.
"Yes?"
"I'm really proud of you. This season. Everything you've been working toward. I hope you know that was never in question, even when I was standing out here on my own."
Something in his expression softened further at that, open in a way he rarely allowed himself to be, even with you. "I know that now," he said. "Thank you for telling me."
He pressed a slow, careful kiss to the top of your head, and the two of you stayed there beneath the stars until the night had gone properly cold, unwilling, for once, to let anything as small as the weather pull either of you back inside before you were ready.
Kita Shinsuke × Reader | Haikyuu!! | Timeskip | Established Relationship | Domestic Fluff, Comfort
Word Count: ~4,500
Summary:
There are no alarms, no rushing, and nowhere either of you needs to be. On a quiet Sunday morning, you wake before Kita only to find yourself trapped beneath the warmth of his arm, your every attempt to sneak out of bed met with sleepy protests and gentle insistence that five more minutes won't hurt anyone. The morning unfolds with whispered conversations beneath tangled blankets, forehead kisses, homemade breakfast, tending the garden together, and the quiet realization that loving Kita has always felt like coming home. (I feel like shin is a little out of character and this is how he behaves with his family)
Warnings: None — pure comfort. Sleepy cuddles, lazy morning, forehead kisses, gentle teasing, domestic fluff, soft touches, homemade breakfast, gardening together, quiet conversations, established relationship, lots of affection, and tooth-rotting sweetness.
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You woke before he did, which was rare enough on its own to make you lie still for a moment just to confirm it was true.
Sunlight was already coming soft and gold through the gap in the curtains, the kind of early, unhurried light that meant it was later than you thought but not late enough to matter, and the room was quiet in the particular way that only existed on Sundays — no alarm waiting to go off in ten minutes, no farm work calling either of you out of bed before the birds had properly started, nowhere either of you needed to be.
Kita was still asleep beside you, which felt like its own small miracle. In all the time you'd known him, you could count on one hand the number of mornings you'd woken before him — he rose with the sun on instinct, some deep, unshakable rhythm built into him by years of farm mornings that started before dawn whether the season demanded it or not. But today, apparently, his body had decided to grant itself a rare and unprecedented mercy, and you found yourself looking at him for a long moment before you tried to move at all.
He slept the way he did most things — neatly, without excess, one arm tucked beneath the pillow and the other draped loosely across your waist, his face soft and unguarded in a way it rarely allowed itself to be while awake. There was something almost unbearably tender about seeing him like this, all the careful composure stripped away by sleep, nothing left but the plain, uncomplicated fact of him breathing slow and even beside you.
You tried, very carefully, to slide free of his arm.
It didn't work.
The moment you shifted, his arm tightened around you on some sleeping instinct, pulling you back against his chest with a low, wordless sound of protest that vibrated through you more than it was actually spoken.
"Shin," you whispered, half-laughing, "I need to get up."
"No," he mumbled, voice thick and rough with sleep, entirely without his usual crisp clarity. "Five more minutes."
"You always say five more minutes."
"And I'm always right." He pulled you in closer, tucking his face against the back of your shoulder, and you felt more than heard the small, satisfied exhale that followed, like he'd settled some important matter and considered the conversation closed.
"Shinsuke."
"Mm."
"It's already past eight."
"Nothing's due before nine," he said, which was, annoyingly, entirely true — the two of you had cleared your whole morning specifically for this, no chores scheduled, no visitors expected, nothing but the quiet, empty stretch of a day with nowhere it needed to go. You'd planned for exactly this kind of morning and now found yourself, somehow, the one trying to escape it.
"I wanted to make breakfast."
"Later." His voice had dropped even lower, sleep pulling at the edges of it, one hand finding yours where it rested against the mattress and lacing your fingers together with slow, deliberate care, like even half-asleep he couldn't help but be exact about it. "Stay. Just a little longer."
You gave up trying to argue, mostly because there was something in the low, honest request that undid whatever resolve you'd woken up with, and let yourself settle back against him instead, matching your breathing to his, the warm weight of his arm around you feeling less like something to escape and more like the entire point of the morning.
"Fine," you murmured. "Five minutes."
"Mm-hm."
Five minutes, predictably, became twenty.
You spent most of it in comfortable half-silence, the kind that didn't need filling, tangled together beneath blankets gone warm from both your bodies, the sun climbing slowly higher outside while neither of you made any real move to acknowledge it. Every so often he'd press a slow, unhurried kiss to your shoulder, or your hair, or the crown of your head, small and wordless, like punctuation in a conversation made up mostly of silence.
"You're not actually falling back asleep," you said eventually, feeling the steady rise and fall of his breathing against your back, too even to be entirely unconscious.
"No."
"Then why won't you let me up?"
"Because," he said, and you felt him shift slightly, propping himself up just enough to look at you properly, his hair mussed in a way that made him look younger, softer, none of the sharp precision he carried through every other hour of the week, "I don't get many mornings where there's nowhere to be. Wanted to actually have one. With you. Not rushing through it."
You turned in his arms to face him properly, and found him watching you with the same quiet, steady warmth he always did — nothing dramatic in it, nothing performed, just the plain, settled fact of his affection laid out openly across his face the way it so rarely got to be during the busy stretch of an ordinary week.
"That's a good reason," you admitted.
"I thought so." He reached up, brushing a strand of hair back from your face with careful fingers, and pressed a slow, soft kiss to your forehead that lingered a beat longer than it needed to. "Morning."
"Morning," you said back, smiling against the warmth of it. "You're sappier when you first wake up. Anyone ever tell you that?"
"No one's around to notice. Except you." He said it plainly, without embarrassment, the honesty of it settling warm in your chest the way his honesty always did — never flowery, never overdone, just true, stated simply because it was true and there was no reason not to say it. "Didn't used to be, before. Guess you're a bad influence."
"I'll take that as a compliment."
"It was meant as one." His thumb traced a slow, absent line along your jaw, and for a while neither of you said anything else at all, content just to look at each other in the gold morning light, the whole quiet weight of the day stretching ahead of you with nothing urgent enough to interrupt it.
"What do you want to do today?" you asked eventually, voice still soft with sleep.
"This. For a while longer." A small, wry curve touched the corner of his mouth. "Then breakfast. Then the garden needs weeding, if you don't mind helping."
"On a lazy Sunday you're already planning chores."
"It's not a chore if I like doing it with you." He said it so simply, so entirely without artifice, that you felt your chest go warm and a little overwhelmed, the way it sometimes still did even after years together, at how easily he said things that other people seemed to need to work up to. "Besides. Garden doesn't care what day it is. Weeds grow the same on Sundays."
"That's very practical of the weeds."
"Weeds are consistent," he said, mock-serious. "Unlike some people who try to sneak out of bed at eight in the morning."
"I was going to make you breakfast."
"I know. And I appreciate the thought. But this—" he tucked you back in against his chest, arm settling warm and secure around you again, "—this is breakfast too. Just a different course."
You laughed, quiet and warm, and let yourself stay exactly where you were for a while longer, because there was truly nowhere else, in that moment, you would rather have been.
Breakfast, when you finally made it out of bed closer to nine, was a slow, unhurried affair conducted mostly in comfortable silence, the kind that had built up between you over years of shared kitchens and shared mornings until it no longer needed narrating.
Kita moved through the kitchen with the same quiet precision he brought to everything else — rice measured exactly, vegetables cut into neat, even pieces, the whole process conducted without wasted motion, though he made room, without being asked, for you to work alongside him rather than simply watching.
"You always cut things so evenly," you said, watching him work through a daikon with practiced, unhurried strokes. "Even when it's just for us. No one's grading this."
"Habit," he said, echoing an old, familiar refrain between you. "Grew up on a farm. If you're wasteful, it shows up later. Sticks with you."
"You say that about everything. The folding, the garden rows, the—"
"Because it's true about everything," he said, mild, glancing at you with the faintest hint of a smile. "Doesn't mean it's a bad thing. Just means I like doing things properly."
"I've noticed."
"You married someone who likes doing things properly," he said, plain, nodding toward the ring on your hand as if it were simply supporting evidence for an argument rather than the single most significant fact of both your lives. "Should've expected the daikon to be even too."
You smiled down at your own work, chopping green onions with far less precision than his own, and felt him glance over more than once, not correcting you, just watching, the same quiet attention he brought to everything that involved you.
The two of you ate at the small kitchen table with the window open, morning air drifting in warm and unhurried, the food simple and homemade in the way that had become its own quiet ritual over years together — rice, grilled fish, a soft, perfectly cooked egg, vegetables from your own garden that he'd harvested just days before. He ate the way he did everything, methodical and unhurried, but paused more than once just to look at you across the table, something soft and settled behind his eyes that he didn't bother hiding.
"What?" you asked, catching him at it.
"Nothing." A small, private smile. "Just like watching you eat breakfast I made. Feels like a good use of a morning."
"You're going to make me blush before nine-thirty."
"Good," he said, entirely unrepentant, reaching across the table to brush his thumb once, gently, along the back of your hand. "That's usually the goal."
The garden, once you finally made it outside, was warm with late-morning sun, rows of vegetables he tended with the same quiet devotion he brought to every other part of his life — tomatoes climbing their stakes, neat rows of greens, herbs planted in careful, deliberate order along the border.
"You've got weeds coming up here," he said, crouching by one of the rows, gesturing for you to join him. "And here. If we don't get them now they'll choke the roots before the week's out."
"You really do think about this stuff like it's a Sunday obligation."
"I think about it like it matters," he corrected, gentle, already working a weed loose from the soil with careful, practiced fingers. "Same as anything else worth doing right."
You settled beside him in the dirt, working through your own row at a slower, clumsier pace, and for a long while neither of you spoke much at all, content in the quiet, easy rhythm of working side by side — the warm smell of turned earth, the low hum of insects in the morning heat, his presence beside you steady and familiar in the specific way that had, somewhere over the years, stopped feeling like anything you needed to remark on and simply become the shape of your life.
"You're getting dirt on your face," he said eventually, glancing over.
"Where?"
"Here." He reached over, brushing gently at your cheek with the back of one soil-dusted hand, which mostly succeeded in transferring more dirt onto your face rather than removing any, and you both looked at each other for a beat before he huffed something that was almost a laugh.
"You just made it worse."
"I did." He didn't look remotely sorry about it. "Suits you, though."
"Dirt suits me."
"Everything suits you," he said, simple, matter-of-fact, returning to his own row like the statement required no further elaboration, like it was simply one more true thing among many that didn't need to be dressed up to land.
You worked for a while longer in that same easy quiet, the sun climbing higher, sweat gathering faintly at your temples in the warmth, until he finally sat back on his heels and surveyed the cleared rows with quiet satisfaction.
"That's better," he said. "Should hold another week or two now."
"You say that every week."
"Because it's true every week." He stood, offering you a hand up, and pulled you gently to your feet, close enough that you ended up standing chest to chest with him in the middle of the garden, his hands settling loosely at your waist. "Thank you. For helping."
"You'd have done it faster alone."
"Probably," he admitted, entirely without offense. "But I'd rather do it slow, with you, than fast, alone. Every time."
Something in the plain, unhesitating honesty of that settled warm and heavy in your chest, the way it always did with him — no grand declarations, no performance, just quiet, uncomplicated truth stated the same way he stated everything, like there was no reason to dress it up when the plain version already said everything that needed saying.
You ended up back inside not long after, the day's single obligation cleared, the whole rest of the Sunday stretching ahead of you with nothing at all that needed doing. You washed the dirt from your hands at the kitchen sink, and he came up behind you at some point, arms circling loosely around your waist, chin settling against the top of your head while you finished.
"What now?" you asked.
"Now," he said, "we do nothing. Properly, this time. No pretending we're about to get up and be productive."
"That sounds suspiciously like something you'd have to be talked into most Sundays."
"Most Sundays I don't get one like this." His arms tightened slightly around you, and you felt him press a slow kiss to the crown of your head, the same easy affection from that morning returning now with nothing left to interrupt it. "No storm coming. No match to prep for. Nothing but you, and the house, and a whole day with nowhere it has to go."
You turned in his arms to face him, water still dripping faintly from your hands, and found him looking at you with the same soft, settled warmth from the bedroom that morning — nothing urgent in it, nothing that needed doing, just the plain fact of loving you laid out openly across his face in the unhurried Sunday light.
"You know," you said, quiet, "I used to think you'd be hard to read. Before we got together, I mean. Everyone said you were unreadable."
"And now?"
"Now I think you're the easiest person I know to read. You just don't waste words on things that don't need saying twice." You reached up, resting a hand against his jaw, feeling the small, warm exhale that left him at the touch. "You show it instead. All the time. I just had to learn to notice."
"Took you long enough," he said, but there was no real teasing in it, just quiet affection, his own hand coming up to cover yours where it rested against his face.
"You're worth the wait."
Something shifted in his expression at that — not quite surprise, but close to it, the particular stillness of a man who still, after years together, hadn't fully gotten used to being told, plainly, that he mattered as much as he did.
"Come here," he said, quiet, and pulled you gently into the living room, settling onto the couch and drawing you down against his side with the same unhurried care he brought to everything, one arm looping loosely around your shoulders while the other found your hand, fingers lacing together the same slow, deliberate way they had that morning.
You spent the rest of the late morning like that — tangled together on the couch, talking about nothing in particular, the kind of meandering, easy conversation that didn't require conclusions, drifting between old memories and small plans for the coming week and long stretches of comfortable silence that needed no filling at all. He told you, at one point, about a farmhand who'd started that spring and kept mixing up the rows, and you laughed until your eyes watered at the particular deadpan patience with which he described correcting the same mistake four separate times. You told him, in turn, about something small and silly from your own week, and watched him listen with the same complete, unhurried attention he gave everything that came from you, like nothing else in the world required his focus more urgently than whatever you happened to be saying.
"I like this," you said eventually, into the quiet that settled after, your head resting against his chest, his heartbeat slow and steady beneath your ear. "Mornings like this. Not doing anything. Just — this."
"Me too." His hand moved slowly through your hair, unhurried, the same absent, contented motion from earlier in the morning. "Didn't used to understand it. The appeal of doing nothing. Always felt like time being wasted."
"And now?"
"Now I think this is the least wasted time I spend all week." He pressed a slow kiss to the top of your head, settling deeper into the couch, pulling you in closer against him like there was nowhere else in the world he'd rather be holding you than exactly here. "Feels like the whole point, actually. Everything else — the farm, the team, all of it — feels like it's in service of getting back to mornings like this. With you."
You tilted your head up to look at him properly, something warm and full swelling in your chest at the plain, unguarded honesty of it, and found him looking back at you with an expression that held absolutely nothing back — no careful composure, no measured restraint, just the open, settled certainty of a man entirely at peace with exactly where and who he'd chosen to spend his quiet mornings with.
"Shinsuke."
"Mm."
"I love you. You know that, right?"
"I know." He said it simply, without hesitation, the same plain certainty he brought to everything true. "Love you too. Every ordinary morning of it."
He kissed you then, slow and unhurried, nothing urgent in it at all, just the quiet, settled affection of two people with an entire lazy Sunday still ahead of them and absolutely nowhere they needed to be. When he pulled back, he rested his forehead against yours for a long moment, breathing slow and easy, and you felt, more clearly than you had in a long while, the plain, uncomplicated truth of it — that loving him, all these quiet, unhurried mornings, had never once felt like anything but coming home.
"Five more minutes?" he murmured, echoing his own words from that morning, a faint, private smile touching his mouth.
"Take as many as you want," you said, settling back against his chest, his arm tightening securely around you. "We've got nowhere to be."
"Good," he said, quiet and content, pressing one last kiss to the crown of your head as the late morning light drifted warm and golden through the windows around you. "That's exactly how I like it."
Summary:
After noticing you've been running on empty all week, Yamaguchi quietly shows up at your apartment with a tote bag full of hair care, skincare, fluffy towels, your favorite tea, and a carefully researched plan to help you finally relax. What starts as a simple self-care night turns into an evening of gentle scalp massages, matching face masks, warm conversations, and the kind of quiet love that asks for nothing in return—only that you let him take care of you for once.
Warnings: None — pure comfort. Domestic fluff, hair brushing, scalp massage, skincare routine, forehead kisses, cuddling, sleepy reader, established relationship, gentle physical affection, lots of praise, and tooth-rotting softness.
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You heard the knock before you heard your own name, three soft raps against your apartment door followed by his voice, muffled through the wood, unmistakably careful in the way it always was when he suspected you'd had a bad week and didn't want to say so outright.
"It's me."
You dragged yourself off the couch where you'd been half-buried under a blanket for the better part of an hour, doing nothing in particular except staring at your phone without reading anything on it, and opened the door to find him standing there with a tote bag looped over one shoulder, looking simultaneously pleased with himself and slightly nervous, the way he always looked when he'd planned something and hadn't yet found out if it would land.
"Hi," he said, and then, before you could get a word out, "don't ask what's in the bag yet. I want to do this properly."
"Tadashi—"
"Properly," he repeated, stepping past you into the apartment with the gentle, apologetic sidestep of someone who knew he was being a little pushy and had decided to be pushy anyway. "You've had a rough week. I know because you sent me four texts on Tuesday that were just the screaming emoji, and then nothing yesterday, which is worse."
"I was busy."
"You were exhausted," he said, kindly, setting the bag down on your kitchen counter and starting to unpack it before you could protest further. "Which is fine. Which is allowed. But tonight you're not doing anything except sitting still and letting me take care of you, and it's non-negotiable, so you can save your objections."
You watched, half amused and half undone by the sheer domestic confidence of it, as he lined up his purchases on the counter — a hair mask in a tub that looked suspiciously professional-grade, a small bottle of oil, a stack of towels so fluffy they looked freshly bought, your favorite tea, and, last, almost shy about it, a satin scrunchie in a soft color he held up for a second before setting it down.
"It reminded me of you," he said, ears already going a little pink. "I don't know. I saw it and thought of you and then I just — bought it. Is that weird?"
"That's not weird." Your chest had gone warm and full in a way that made it hard to keep teasing him the way you wanted to. "That's very sweet, actually."
"Okay. Good." He cleared his throat, visibly recovering, and gestured toward the bathroom with the air of a man executing a plan he'd rehearsed. "Bathroom. Let's go. I've got a whole system."
"A system."
"I researched it," he said, entirely serious, already steering you gently by the shoulders toward the hallway. "All week. I wanted to do it properly."
He sat you down on a stool in front of the bathroom mirror, draped a towel over your shoulders with the kind of care usually reserved for something breakable, and picked up your hairbrush like he was handling a delicate instrument rather than a twelve-dollar detangler from the drugstore.
"Tell me if I pull," he said, starting at the very ends of your hair, working upward in small, patient sections instead of dragging straight through the way you usually did when you were in a hurry.
"You won't pull."
"I might. I'm still learning your hair." He said it without any embarrassment at all, entirely focused on the task, working through a stubborn tangle with a gentleness that made your eyes want to slip shut. "Kuroo told me the trick is starting from the bottom. Apparently his girlfriend taught him that."
"Kuroo gave you hair advice."
"Kuroo gives everyone advice whether they want it or not. This time it happened to be useful." He worked through another section, slow and careful, and you felt the tension of the entire week — the stress, the exhaustion, the low simmering ache behind your eyes — start to loosen incrementally with every pass of the brush. "You're allowed to fall asleep, by the way. If this puts you to sleep, that's a compliment, not a failure."
"I'm not going to fall asleep sitting up."
"We'll see."
Once every tangle had surrendered, he set the brush down and reached for the little bottle of oil, warming a small amount between his palms before he touched it to your scalp, and the first press of his fingers made you exhale a sound you hadn't planned on making out loud.
"Good?" he asked, voice gone soft and a little pleased with himself.
"Very good."
"I watched a video on this too. Apparently you're supposed to use your fingertips, not your nails, and go in slow circles, starting at the temples." He demonstrated exactly that, thumbs moving in slow, deliberate circles at your temples before working back through the rest of your scalp, unhurried, like he had nowhere else to be and nothing else he'd rather be doing. "Is this too much pressure?"
"No. It's perfect."
"Okay." You could hear the smile in his voice even without seeing it, his fingers continuing their slow work while he kept talking, low and easy, filling the quiet with small, meandering stories about his week — a mix-up at practice, something ridiculous Tsukishima had said that made you laugh despite the state of half-melting relaxation you'd sunk into, a customer at the shop where he'd picked up your tea who'd tried to pay entirely in coins. None of it required a response. He wasn't trying to get anywhere with any of it. He was just talking, softly, the way you talked to someone you loved when you wanted to give them something to listen to besides their own tired thoughts.
By the time he worked the hair mask through in slow, methodical sections, you'd gone almost entirely boneless under his hands, eyes closed, shoulders finally unclenched from wherever they'd been living all week.
"There," he said, once every strand was coated, tucking your hair up into a loose knot with a soft clip. "Now we let it sit. Fifteen minutes, the bottle said."
"You read the bottle."
"I read all the bottles. Repeatedly. I wanted to get this right." He crouched down slightly so he was more level with you, resting his forearms on his knees, watching you with the particular softness he reserved for moments like this — quiet, unguarded, nothing performative about it. "You looked really tired today. In your texts, I mean. I could just — tell."
"It was a lot. This week."
"I know." He reached up, brushing a stray piece of hair back from your face that had escaped the clip, fingers lingering just a moment longer than the task required. "You don't have to tell me about it if you don't want to. Just wanted you to know I noticed. And that tonight's for you. All of it."
You reached out and caught his hand before he could pull it back, pressing a small kiss to his knuckles, and watched, with real delight, as color bloomed instantly across his cheeks.
"Thank you," you said. "For noticing. For — all of this."
"It's not a big deal," he said, entirely unconvincing, ears going pink to match his cheeks now.
"It's a huge deal, Tadashi."
"Okay, maybe a little bit of a big deal," he admitted, ducking his head, and you laughed, soft and warm, and watched him go even redder at the sound of it.
Washing the mask out took longer than either of you expected, mostly because he insisted on doing it himself, tipping your head back gently over the sink with a folded towel cushioning your neck, testing the water temperature against his own wrist twice before he let it near you.
"Too hot?"
"It's perfect."
"You'd tell me if it wasn't."
"I would."
He worked the water through slowly, careful around your ears, rinsing until the water ran clear, and then wrapped your hair in one of the new fluffy towels with the same careful precision he'd brought to everything else tonight, twisting it up into a soft turban that he tucked at the nape of your neck.
"There," he said, pleased with himself, guiding you by the shoulders out toward your bedroom. "Now the fun part."
"There's a fun part after the fun part?"
"The skincare part." He said it like it was self-evident, already settling himself cross-legged on your bed and pulling an honestly alarming number of small bottles and jars out of the tote bag, lining them up in a neat row like surgical instruments. "I made a whole list. In order. I didn't want to mess up the routine."
"You made a list."
"I made a list," he confirmed, entirely without shame, pulling out his phone to check it against the row of products. "Cleanser first. Then toner. Then the essence, then the serum, then eye cream, then moisturizer, then the sheet mask last, because apparently you want your skin prepped before you seal everything in. I read four different articles on this."
"Tadashi."
"What? I wanted to do it properly." He looked up at you, earnest and a little nervous, like he was genuinely worried he'd gotten the order wrong despite the fact that you were smiling at him so hard your cheeks had started to ache. "Is that— is this too much? I can simplify it if—"
"It's not too much." You reached out and squeezed his hand where it rested on his knee. "It's perfect. Genuinely. I've never had anyone put this much thought into my skincare routine in my entire life."
"Well," he said, ears going pink again, "you deserve it. So."
He worked through the list with the same careful, methodical attention he'd given your hair — cleansing your face with slow, gentle strokes, following up with the toner on a cotton pad he swept across your skin so lightly you barely felt it, narrating each step half to you and half to himself as he double-checked his own memory of the order against his phone.
"Essence next," he said, squeezing a small amount into his palm and warming it between his hands the way you'd taught him once, weeks ago, for the oil. "This one's supposed to help everything else absorb better. I think."
"You think?"
"I'm ninety percent sure." He patted it gently into your skin, careful and unhurried, and you closed your eyes again, letting the whole ritual of it wash over you — his hands, his low, steady voice, the particular quality of attention he brought to a task that most people considered mundane, that he had somehow, this week, decided to research like it was an exam he refused to fail.
The moisturizer, when he got to it, came with an apology attached almost immediately.
"Sorry," he said, wincing, "I think I used too much. Your face is a little—"
"Shiny?"
"Glowing. I was going to say glowing." He dabbed at the excess with a soft, embarrassed laugh, working it in more evenly. "I'll use less next time."
"Next time," you repeated, something warm blooming in your chest at the easy, assumed permanence of it — that there would be a next time, that this wasn't a single grand gesture but the first entry in something ongoing.
"Obviously," he said, like it was self-evident. "This is happening again. I bought enough product for like six of these."
You laughed, and he looked up at the sound of it with that same soft, helpless expression from earlier, before ducking his head to focus on the sheet mask, peeling it carefully from its packaging and smoothing it over your face with careful fingers, adjusting the eye holes twice before he was satisfied.
"There," he said. "Perfect. Well — almost."
"What's wrong?"
"I think I got a little on your eyebrow." He reached out, dabbing gently at the corner of your brow with his sleeve, apologetic and endeared all at once. "Sorry. I'm still learning the geometry of your face."
"You've known my face for two years, Tadashi."
"The mask changes the geometry," he said, with total seriousness, and you laughed again, and he smiled at you from behind his own half-adjusted mask — because he'd put one on too, at some point in the last few minutes, matching yours exactly, the two of you now sitting cross-legged across from each other in identical sheet masks like some absurd, tender ritual only the two of you were in on.
"We look ridiculous," you said.
"We look great," he corrected. "This is a whole aesthetic. Very self-care. Very couples' spa night."
"In my studio apartment."
"The best spas are in studio apartments," he said, entirely deadpan, and pressed a soft kiss to your masked forehead before you could argue the point further, the gesture slightly muffled by the sheet mask between you, which made you both dissolve into quiet laughter against each other.
You peeled the masks off ten minutes later, patted the remaining essence into your skin the way he instructed — "the bottle said don't rinse it, just pat it in, I read that part three times to be sure" — and changed into the soft set of pajamas you kept for exactly this kind of night, while he changed into the spare shirt he kept in your dresser drawer without either of you ever having discussed when, exactly, that drawer had become his.
By the time you settled onto the couch together, the tea he'd brought was still warm, and he handed you your mug before pulling the blanket up over both your laps, tucking it in at your side with the same fussy care he'd brought to everything else tonight.
"Documentary?" he asked, already reaching for the remote.
"You know what I'm going to pick."
"The ocean one. Obviously." He pulled it up without further discussion, settling back against the couch cushions and opening his arm in silent invitation, and you curled into his side without hesitation, head finding the familiar spot against his shoulder, his freshly-washed hair mixing faintly with yours in a way that smelled, now, like the same products.
"Comfortable?" he asked.
"Very."
"Good." He pressed a kiss to the top of your head, absent and easy, the kind of small affection that had stopped requiring announcement between you months ago, and let his fingers find their way into your hair, still faintly damp at the ends, playing idly with the strands while the documentary's narrator began describing bioluminescence in low, soothing tones.
You didn't make it fifteen minutes.
You felt yourself going soft and heavy against him somewhere around the part about anglerfish, the narrator's voice blending gently with the low, comfortable rhythm of Yamaguchi's breathing, his fingers still moving slowly through your hair, and the last thing you were fully aware of was the warmth of the tea in your hands and the steady, unhurried weight of his arm around you.
He noticed the exact moment you went under — the mug tipping slightly in your slack grip until he caught it and set it safely on the side table, your breathing evening out into the slow, deep rhythm of actual sleep, your whole body finally, completely at rest against him after a week that had clearly asked far too much of you.
He didn't wake you. He didn't move much at all, actually, beyond reaching for the throw blanket folded over the back of the couch and easing it more securely around your shoulders, tucking the edge beneath you so you wouldn't get cold, his fingers still moving in slow, absent circles through your hair even though you could no longer feel them.
The documentary played on quietly in front of him, narrating something about coral reefs now, but he'd mostly stopped watching it, more interested in the soft, even weight of you against his side and the particular, quiet privilege of being the person you'd fallen asleep on.
"Yeah," he murmured to himself, barely above a whisper, smiling down at you in the dim blue light of the television. "Worth it."
He pressed one last kiss to your forehead, gentle enough not to wake you, and settled back against the cushions to let the documentary run out its length in the quiet, thinking — with the same easy, uncomplicated certainty he brought to everything about loving you — that this, exactly this, was his favorite kind of date.
"I said stay still."
"I'm fine."
"No, you're stubborn."
"...Tch."
"And if you tear your stitches again, I'm charging you double."
...He still tears them.
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Chapter Four — Doctor's Orders
15k–18k words
Summary
Six weeks post-op, and the man who once refused treatment on his own operating table now waits quietly for his surgeon without complaint. Reader notices the change before she lets herself name it—better sleep, cleaner scars, a patient who's finally stopped fighting his own recovery. A home visit meant to check for hazards instead reveals the architecture of a man who's never learned to ask for comfort, so he built discipline in its place. When Reader discovers his personal number was never made official in his file, she rewrites his emergency contact hierarchy without asking—and he notices, and doesn't mind nearly as much as either of them expected. By the time he shows up at the end of a brutal double shift with takeout and the exact knowledge of which headache means she's skipped lunch again, neither of them is pretending this is only medicine anymore.
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A week had passed since the coffee shop encounter, and you had spent most of it trying very hard not to think about it.
You were not entirely successful.
It kept surfacing at inconvenient times — while you were charting, while you were half-asleep on the drive home, once, mortifyingly, in the middle of a case conference when a colleague said the word "espresso" and you'd had to cover a full three seconds of silence with a cough. You told yourself it meant nothing. You told yourself a lot of things that week that didn't hold up particularly well under scrutiny.
So when Monday rolled around and the schedule on your tablet lit up with his name at the top of the afternoon block, you found yourself glancing at the clock more than the situation warranted, and hating that you'd noticed yourself doing it.
You were in the break room when the first sign came, half a sandwich in one hand, half your attention on a chart, when Nurse Ibara's head appeared around the doorframe with the particular look of someone bearing news too strange to deliver casually.
"Ground Zero's waiting for Dr. Y/N," she said.
You looked up. "Okay. Tell him five minutes."
"No, I mean—" Ibara stepped fully into the doorway now, arms crossed, brow furrowed like she was trying to solve a puzzle that had rearranged itself overnight. "He's waiting. In the chair. Hasn't said a word to anyone. Didn't threaten to walk into the back himself. Didn't ask why you weren't ready yet. He just sat down and said, and I'm quoting directly here, 'tell her to take her time.'"
You set your sandwich down slowly, as though sudden movement might disturb whatever fragile new reality this was.
"He said take your time."
"Word for word." Ibara's expression had shifted from confusion into something closer to delight, the specific delight of hospital staff who had spent months bracing for a patient's arrival like a weather event. "Nurse Daichi thinks he's been possessed. Nurse Renge is placing bets on how long it'll last."
"What are the odds?"
"Terrible, for you having a normal appointment. Excellent, for whatever's actually going on." Ibara raised an eyebrow at you in a way that made you very aware of exactly how transparent your own face had become over the last several weeks, and you cleared your throat and stood, tossing the rest of your sandwich in the bin with more purpose than the object deserved.
"It's nothing," you said. "He's healing well. People are calmer when they're not in pain."
"Sure," Ibara said, in the tone of someone filing that answer away for later use as evidence against you. "Room three's ready whenever you are, Doctor."
He was, indeed, sitting.
You clocked it the second you stepped through the door — the posture alone was enough to confirm the rumor, because Bakugo Katsuki did not, as a rule, sit and wait. He occupied space the way he did everything else, with force, with impatience, with the low-grade threat of violence simmering just under the surface of every interaction with hospital bureaucracy. You had watched him, on more than one prior visit, pace a exam room like a caged animal, watched him snap at residents who took thirty seconds too long pulling up his chart, watched him once nearly walk out entirely because he'd been kept waiting past his appointment time by all of four minutes.
Today he was slouched back in the chair, one boot braced against the frame of the exam table, arms crossed, and when you stepped in he didn't so much as straighten — just tracked you across the room with a look that was almost lazy. Almost content. Like he'd been waiting to see you specifically, rather than waiting to be done with an obligation.
"You're late," he said. Which was, for him, practically a greeting worthy of a diplomatic summit.
"Four minutes."
"Still late."
"Noted." You pulled up his chart on the wall display, mostly to have somewhere to put your eyes that wasn't him, which had become a more frequent tactic than you were entirely comfortable admitting. "How's the pain?"
"Manageable."
"Bakugo."
"It's fine," he said, with the particular irritation of a man who resented being fine, or resented that you'd know the difference between fine and fine the second the words left his mouth. "Sleeping better too, if that's what you're about to ask."
You hadn't asked yet. You'd been about to. The fact that he'd beaten you to it — offered the information up unprompted, without you having to pry it out of him the way you usually did — registered as its own small data point, filed away next to the waiting-room miracle Ibara had reported.
"How much better?"
"Enough that I'm not up at four in the morning wanting to put my fist through a wall." He said it flatly, like it cost him nothing, but you caught the shift in his jaw when he said it, the way his eyes slid briefly off yours toward the window instead. "Whatever. Just check the thing and let me go."
"The thing," you repeated, already snapping on a pair of gloves, "is a full follow-up, and it'll take as long as it takes, so you might as well get comfortable."
He grumbled something under his breath that might have been agreement and might have been a general threat leveled at the entire medical profession, and let you get to work without further complaint — which was, itself, remarkable enough that you almost wanted to write it into the chart as a symptom.
You started where you always started, methodically, because methodical was the only way you'd survived three months of treating a man who considered his own body an inconvenience to be pushed through rather than a thing that required patience.
"Vitals first," you said, and he held out his arm without being asked, which was new. The blood pressure cuff inflated, the readout settled into a number well within normal range — better than normal, actually, better than it had been at any point since the injury — and you made a soft, satisfied sound that made him glance at you sideways.
"That good?"
"That's very good." You noted it down. "Your resting heart rate's come down too. Whatever you're doing, keep doing it."
"Sleeping. Eating on a schedule. Not letting Kirishima talk me into staying up till three watching him lose at fighting games." He said the last part like it was a genuine hardship he'd had to overcome, and you fought down the urge to smile at the mental image.
"Sounds brutal."
"You have no idea. Man loses every round and acts like it's a personality trait."
You moved to his side, checking the pulse at his wrist out of habit even though the machine had already told you everything you needed, and felt him go very slightly still under your fingers — not tense, exactly, just aware, in a way that made the silence stretch a half-second longer than clinical necessity required. You released his wrist and stepped back, clearing your throat, and pulled up the imaging from his last scan on the display.
"Alright. Let's see the actual damage, then. Shirt up."
He pulled his shirt over his head without ceremony, tossing it onto the exam table, and you made yourself focus on the scar instead of the general fact of him, which was a professional skill you'd had to develop rather aggressively over the last several weeks.
The swelling along his ribs had gone down considerably. You pressed gently at the edge of the old wound, watching his face for a flinch that didn't come.
"Does that hurt?"
"No."
"Bakugo."
"I said no, it doesn't hurt, quit looking at me like I'm lying."
"I'm looking at you like a doctor who's dealt with you for three months," you said, mild, and moved on before he could argue that particular point further. The scar itself, when you examined it more closely, had healed cleaner than you'd dared hope this early into recovery — the skin knitting smooth and pale instead of the angry, puckered red it had been weeks ago, the tissue underneath yielding properly instead of catching and tugging the way scar tissue often did in patients who pushed too hard too soon.
"This is excellent," you said, half to him, half to the chart, tracing the length of the scar with a gloved finger to check for any residual hardness. "Genuinely. I don't say that lightly."
"I know you don't." Something in his voice had gone quieter, almost pleased, in a way he clearly hadn't meant to let show, because he covered it half a second later with, "Means I get to go back to actual training instead of your stupid physical therapy exercises."
"We'll get to that." You straightened, moving to check his range of motion next. "Raise your arm for me. Both sides, slow."
He did, without the usual muttered complaint about being treated like a lab rat that had characterized every prior appointment, and you watched the motion carefully — shoulder rotating higher than it had at last visit, no visible hitch, no compensating tilt of his torso to avoid the pull of scar tissue against muscle.
"Mobility's improved a lot," you said, genuinely surprised. "More than I expected for this stage, honestly."
"Because I've been doing the stretches you told me to do. Like a good little patient." The sarcasm was reflexive, worn smooth with use, the kind of thing he said to keep himself at a comfortable distance from anything resembling an actual compliment. But there was something almost sheepish buried underneath it too — like he wasn't used to being praised for compliance and didn't quite know where to put the resulting feeling, so he'd disguised it in an insult aimed at himself instead.
"I mean it," you said anyway, because letting the deflection stand unchallenged felt, suddenly, like the wrong call. "This is what following a recovery plan looks like when someone actually commits to it instead of fighting it every step of the way. You should be proud of that."
He didn't answer right away. You glanced up from the chart and found him looking at you with an expression that wasn't quite unguarded but was close, closer than you were used to seeing on him, like your sincerity had caught him somewhere he hadn't braced for it.
"…Yeah," he said finally, gruff, looking away first. "Whatever."
You let it go, mostly because pushing further felt like it would break something delicate that had only just started forming, and stepped in closer instead to check the collar of his shirt where it had ridden up crooked against his neck, dragging directly against the edge of the healing scar with every small movement he made.
You didn't think about it. You just reached out and fixed it — two fingers hooking the fabric back into place, smoothing it down so it sat properly instead of rubbing raw skin — the same unthinking, automatic gesture you might have used on a stray thread or a crooked bandage on any other patient.
He went very still.
You didn't notice at first, too focused on the fact that the collar had clearly been irritating the healing tissue for who-knew-how-long and he hadn't said a single word about it, which was either stubbornness or something else entirely that you didn't have the professional distance to examine right now. It was only when you glanced up, chart still in hand, that you caught the look on his face and held it half a second too long — caught, and understood, and both of you seemed to realize at exactly the same moment that this was an exam room, and you were his doctor, and none of this was supposed to be anything.
Neither of you said anything about it.
You cleared your throat and stepped back, entirely too aware of your own fingers, and busied yourself with the chart like it required your full and immediate attention. He shifted in the chair, arms recrossing, jaw doing that tight, working thing it did when he was actively choosing not to say something.
"Anyway," you said, to the chart, to the room, to absolutely no one in particular. "Lungs sound clear. Reflexes are good. Grip strength is back to within ten percent of baseline, which, again, is faster than I expected." You listened to his chest with the stethoscope, more for procedure at this point than genuine concern, close enough that you could feel the warmth radiating off him even through the thin cotton of the exam gown draped over one shoulder. "Deep breath for me."
He did. You listened. Clear, even, no catch of pain on the inhale that would have indicated the old injury still complaining under pressure.
"Good," you murmured, more to yourself than him, and stepped back to finish typing your notes.
"So," he said, once you'd finished cataloguing every measurable improvement his body had made in the last seven days, "I'm cleared."
"You're cleared for more activity." You held up a hand before he could get out of the chair like that settled the matter entirely. "Light training. No full-contact sparring yet, and absolutely no patrol."
The temperature in the room dropped about ten degrees, which, for a man whose quirk generated literal heat, was an impressive feat of atmosphere.
"You're joking."
"I'm not."
"I've been sitting on my ass for a month—"
"Six weeks," you corrected, calm, because you'd had this exact argument in miniature at every appointment for the last month and knew by now that the only way through it was flat, immovable fact, "and you weren't sitting on your ass, you were recovering from an injury that punctured two organs and nearly killed you, so forgive me if I'm not in a rush to send you back onto rooftops before your tissue's fully load-bearing."
"I'm fine."
"You're fine because you followed the recovery plan," you said, and you didn't raise your voice, because you didn't need to — you just met his eyes and let the flat certainty of it land the way it always did, the way it had landed every single time you'd had to be the immovable object in a room he tried to argue into rubble. "Which means the plan keeps working if you keep following it. Patrol is a hard no. That's not up for negotiation."
"Everything's up for negotiation."
"Not this." You capped your pen, set down the chart, and looked at him directly, arms crossing to mirror his own stubborn posture, because you'd learned a long time ago that matching his energy worked better than trying to soften around it. "You want to argue physiology with me, Bakugo? Because I will remind you, again, that I had my hands inside your abdominal cavity holding your intestines together while a resident called out your time-of-death threshold like a countdown. I stitched you back into a person who could walk out of that hospital under his own power. So no. You don't get patrol yet. You get light training, you get your stretches, you get real food instead of whatever you've been surviving on, and you get to come back in one week so I can tell you whether you've earned anything more than that."
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again, visibly hunting for the argument that would land, turning the logic over like he was looking for a crack in it, and visibly failing to find one — because there wasn't a version of I put your organs back together with my own two hands that he could talk his way around, and you both knew it, and the knowing sat there between you until he finally exhaled, sharp, through his nose, in the universal sound of a man conceding a point he had no intention of admitting he'd conceded.
"…Fine," he bit out, like the word cost him something physical to produce. "One week."
"One week," you agreed. "And if I hear from anyone — Kirishima, Sero, the front desk, a stranger on the street — that you so much as looked at a patrol route in that time—"
"I heard you the first time."
"Good." You allowed yourself the smallest, most professionally-deniable curve of a smile. "Then I'll see you next week, Ground Zero."
He didn't leave immediately.
He pulled his shirt back on, slower than the injury warranted at this point, and you found yourself watching the motion anyway, cataloguing the ease of it against the stiff, guarded way he used to move through the same gesture weeks ago. When he finished, he stood, rolled the shoulder you'd just tested like he was already itching to use it for something you hadn't cleared, and then paused at the door — just for a second, just long enough that you noticed, the way you'd started noticing every small pause that punctuated his usual momentum.
"…Thanks," he said, gruff, not looking at you, the word coming out clipped and half-swallowed like he'd decided to say it and then immediately regretted the decision. "For the collar thing. Whatever."
"It was rubbing against the scar. It's not a big deal."
"Wasn't talking about the collar," he said, which didn't clarify anything at all, and was gone before you could ask him what exactly he had been talking about, the door swinging shut behind him with more quiet than a man like Bakugo Katsuki had any business producing.
You stood there a moment longer than the chart strictly required.
Ibara found you twenty minutes later, still at the nurses' station, chart closed, staring at nothing in particular with an expression she apparently found extremely funny.
"So," she said, sliding into the seat across from you with the specific energy of someone who had been waiting all afternoon for this conversation. "How was the appointment."
"Fine. Good, actually. His mobility's ahead of schedule."
"Uh-huh." She waited. You did not elaborate. "And?"
"And nothing. I cleared him for light training. No patrol. He complained, predictably, and then he left."
"He said thanks," Ibara said, and you very carefully did not ask how she knew that, because the answer was almost certainly that half the nursing staff had their ears pressed to varying degrees of the door at all times when Ground Zero was in the building, a fact you had chosen, for your own sanity, not to think about too closely.
"He's a patient who's recovering well. People say thank you when they're grateful for good medical care."
"Sure," Ibara said again, in that same tone from earlier, the one that filed your denials away for later use as evidence. "That's definitely all that was."
"Ibara."
"I'm just saying, Doctor. Renge owes me twenty bucks either way, so I'm not complaining." She stood, gathering her tablet, and paused at the edge of the station to add, almost gently, in a way that undercut the teasing entirely, "For what it's worth, it's nice. Seeing him calmer. Whatever's doing that — I hope it keeps doing it."
You didn't have an answer for that one either, and she didn't wait around for you to find one, disappearing back down the hall toward her next patient and leaving you alone with the quiet hum of the nurses' station and the distinctly unprofessional realization that you were, in fact, looking forward to next week's appointment rather more than the job description strictly required.
You opened his chart one more time before closing out for the day, scanning back through the last month of notes — the slow, steady climb from guarded, uncooperative, high risk of self-discharge against medical advice to this week's entry, which read, in your own neat handwriting: significant improvement across all markers. Patient compliant and engaged with recovery plan. Mood notably improved.
You looked at that last line for a long moment before you closed the file.
Mood notably improved, you thought, was doing a great deal of quiet, clinical work to avoid saying what you actually meant, which was that somewhere over the last three months, without either of you deciding to let it happen, you had started looking forward to Mondays.
The last time, the apartment had been full — Mina draped over the back of the couch mid-story, gesturing so wide she nearly knocked a drink off the side table; Denki shouting something across the room about a game no one else was playing, half a headset still clamped over one ear; Kirishima's laugh loud enough to rattle the windows in their frames; Sero working methodically through every snack in the kitchen like it was a personal mission assigned to him at birth. You remembered noise. You remembered chaos, warm and easy, the specific chaos of people who had known each other so long they no longer bothered being careful with each other. You remembered leaving that night without ever really looking at the apartment itself, because there hadn't been room to. It had been wallpapered over completely with people.
This was the first time it belonged only to him.
You noticed the silence before you noticed anything else. It sat in the space like something deliberate, not empty so much as held — the quiet of a place that had been arranged, not just lived in. You stood in the entryway for a second longer than necessary, keys to your own car still loosely gripped in one hand, and let yourself simply absorb the difference.
"You're doing the thing," Bakugo said, toeing his shoes off at the door with a precision that made you glance down without meaning to.
Lined up perfectly against the wall. Heel to heel, exactly parallel, toes facing the same direction, like a display in a shop window rather than the discarded footwear of a man who'd just come in from the gym.
"What thing."
"The doctor thing. Where you look at everything like it's a crime scene." He said it without heat, already moving further into the apartment, leaving you to follow or not as you chose.
"I look at everything like it's a home visit," you said, stepping out of your own shoes and setting them, out of some reflexive social pressure, in a rough approximation of the same neat line his occupied, "because it is one," and moved further in before he could argue the semantics of it.
The apartment unfolded around you in a way you hadn't expected, and it took you a full minute of standing in the middle of the living room to identify exactly why.
Not luxury — though it was, technically, the kind of place a top-ten hero could afford without blinking, all clean lines and expensive, minimal furniture, floor-to-ceiling windows framing a skyline that most people would have killed for. But that wasn't what held your attention. What held your attention was order. A kind of order so complete it read less like tidiness and more like a system, every object placed with intent rather than habit.
A stack of laundry sat folded on the arm of the couch, corners squared like they'd been measured with an actual ruler — shirts folded in thirds, sleeves tucked, stacked by color in a gradient that ran dark to light. You stared at it longer than you meant to.
"You fold your laundry like that for yourself?" you asked. "No one's grading this."
"Habit," he said, not looking back at you, already crossing toward the kitchen. "Training camp. If your gear's not squared away, someone confiscates it and makes you run laps to earn it back. Sticks with you."
"That sounds like a specific kind of trauma."
"It sounds like discipline," he corrected, "which is a concept you'd think a doctor would respect."
You let that one go, mostly because you didn't have a rebuttal that wouldn't sound like flirting, and turned your attention to the bookshelf against the far wall instead. It was arranged by height, not color or genre — technical manuals on quirk theory shelved beside training methodology texts, a battered biomechanics textbook with more sticky notes jutting from its pages than actual clean edges, and, tucked at the end almost like an afterthought, a small handful of paperbacks with cracked spines that looked like they'd actually been read more than once, their covers soft and worn at the corners in a way that manuals and textbooks never got.
"You read these?" you asked, tapping one spine.
"Obviously. Why would I own books I don't read."
"Some people own books as furniture."
"Some people," he said, with real disdain, "are idiots." But he'd come to stand near you while he said it, close enough that you were aware of the heat radiating faintly off him even at rest, some low residual warmth that seemed to live under his skin permanently regardless of quirk activity, and you found yourself very deliberately not looking at him and instead at the small tower of hero reports stacked neatly on the desk beside the shelf.
Each one paper-clipped. Each one dated in the corner, in handwriting too neat and careful to belong to someone who supposedly didn't care about the small things. You picked one up without thinking, scanning the first page — incident summary, injury assessment, follow-up notes — and found margin annotations in the same neat hand, corrections to his own written self-assessment, dates crossed out and rewritten where he'd apparently gone back and adjusted an earlier claim about his own condition after the fact.
"You edit your own reports?"
"If I got something wrong the first time." He said it like it was obvious, like anyone would naturally revisit and correct their own paperwork days later out of what could only be described as compulsive precision. "Doesn't help anyone if the record's wrong."
You set the report back down exactly where you'd found it, careful to preserve the paperclip's angle, and moved toward the window, where a small collection of plants sat arranged along the sill — actual, alive, clearly-tended plants, leaves glossy and healthy, one of them recently repotted, soil still dark and damp against the ceramic.
"You garden."
"I keep things alive. That's not the same as gardening."
"It's extremely the same as gardening, Katsuki."
"Whatever." But there was something almost pleased in the deflection, something in the set of his shoulders that told you he'd noticed you noticing, and didn't entirely hate it.
A training schedule was taped to the wall by the kitchen entrance — not haphazard, not a loose scrawl on the back of an envelope, but color-coded, weeks blocked out in a rotating system of strength days, mobility days, quirk-conditioning days, rest days marked in a shade of red that looked almost like a warning, like rest itself was a threat he had to schedule around rather than a thing he naturally gravitated toward. It made your own physical therapy plan for him look like a polite suggestion by comparison.
And beside it, half-hidden by the schedule's curling edge where the tape had started to lift, a photo. Class 1-A, all of them younger — you recognized a few faces from stories he'd told, offhand, over the course of your appointments, names that came up in complaints and in the rare unguarded moment when he talked about people instead of injuries. Everyone in the photo was grinning, mid-laugh, someone's arm slung over his shoulder that he clearly hadn't shoved off camera the way you might have expected, given everything you knew about him.
You looked at that photo a beat longer than you meant to, something in your chest going soft and unguarded in a way you didn't examine too closely, standing there in a stranger's apartment holding proof that he had, once, allowed himself to be photographed happy.
"You kept that up," you said, quiet.
"It's a photo. Where else would it go."
"Some people take theirs down. When people move on. Grow apart."
"That's stupid," he said, flat, final, in a tone that closed the subject entirely, and you didn't push it, because you understood, standing there, that you'd stumbled onto something that mattered to him more than he had any interest in discussing with his doctor in his own living room.
You realized, slowly, standing in the quiet middle of it all, that you'd been wrong about the place the first time — wrong in the specific way of someone who mistakes noise for warmth and its absence for nothing at all. The apartment wasn't lonely. It was disciplined. Every object in it had a reason to be exactly where it was, the way a soldier keeps a footlocker, the way someone keeps a body ready for whatever it might be asked to do next, systems built by a man who had never learned how to ask for comfort and so had constructed order instead, brick by brick, to make sure nothing important ever slipped through.
You were still turning that thought over, quiet and unfinished, when you opened the fridge.
It took you a second to process what you were actually looking at, mostly because there was so little to look at.
A single bottle of water, sweating faintly against the shelf. A jar of something unidentifiable pushed to the very back, label long since worn illegible. And that, as far as you could tell after opening every compartment and shelf with the escalating disbelief of someone conducting a very serious clinical investigation, was the entire inventory. No vegetables. No eggs. No evidence that food had ever occurred in this apartment beyond the theoretical.
"…Katsuki."
"What."
"I thought Kirishima was exaggerating." You said it slowly, like you were still hoping the fridge might produce additional evidence if you simply gave it a little more time to prove itself.
"He was."
You looked at him.
"…No," you said, closing the door slower than you'd opened it, mostly out of respect for the sheer scale of what you'd just witnessed. "He wasn't. He undersold it, if anything. This is — Katsuki, this is a crime scene. This is the crime scene I was accused of looking for earlier."
"I eat." He said it with the same flat, wounded dignity he brought to every accusation he considered beneath him. "I just don't keep it here."
"Where do you keep it, then."
"Wherever's closest when I'm hungry."
"That's not a food plan," you said, already pulling out your phone, thumb moving before you'd fully decided to let it, "that's a hostage situation. Sit down. I'm making you a list."
"I don't need a list."
"You need protein you didn't microwave out of a bag six hours after a training session, and you need it here, in this apartment, so you're not making decisions about food while you're too tired to make good ones." You didn't look up from the notes app, thumbs already moving. "Eggs. Chicken. Something green that isn't garnish. Rice. Actual fruit, not the dried kind that lives in the bottom of your gym bag for three months at a time."
"I don't have a gym bag stash."
"You have a gym bag stash." You still didn't look up. "Kirishima told me about that too, incidentally, along with several other things I'm now realizing I should have asked him about weeks ago."
He made a sound of pure betrayal under his breath — something about loyalty, something about rats, something that might have included the phrase I'm going to end that man — but he didn't argue the underlying point any further, which told you everything you needed to know about its accuracy.
You kept moving instead of dwelling on any of it, phone in one hand, running a mental checklist that had shifted, somewhere in the last five minutes, from groceries into something closer to a proper home safety assessment — the kind you'd conduct for any post-operative patient discharged into independent living, the kind you'd simply never gotten to perform on him the first time, because the apartment had been too full of people to properly see.
"Show me the bathroom," you said.
"Why."
"Because I need to see what painkillers you actually have versus what I've actually prescribed you, and because bathrooms are the single most common site of post-op falls in patients recovering their balance, so humor me."
He led you down a short hallway without further protest, which surprised you enough that you nearly missed the low coffee table positioned in the middle of the living room's traffic path, sharp corner jutting out at exactly hip height — precisely where someone still recovering their balance, moving too fast in a moment of tiredness or distraction, might catch themselves badly.
"That's a hazard," you said, stopping to look at it properly.
"It's a table."
"It's a table with a corner positioned to introduce itself to your hip if you're tired and moving fast. You said earlier your balance still compensates sometimes."
"I said sometimes. When I'm tired." He'd stopped in the hallway to look back at you, arms crossing, something wary creeping into his expression now that the inspection had moved past groceries and into territory that touched more directly on his own body's limits — territory he clearly liked discussing even less than his eating habits.
"Then we move the table. Or you put something soft on the corner. Or, and this is the option I'd actually prefer, you tell me when you're tired before you try to stand up too fast, instead of waiting to see if your balance holds."
"That's not how I operate."
"I'm aware," you said, dry. "It's why I'm walking through your apartment cataloguing hazards instead of trusting you to flag them yourself."
He didn't have an answer for that one, and you continued down the hall, cataloguing as you went — the height of a shelf near the bathroom door that would require an overhead reach, testing mentally whether the motion would pull at the healing scar tissue along his ribs if he stretched for something stored there; the slight give of the bathmat, which you nudged with your foot and found lacked any rubber backing, a slip risk you flagged out loud without waiting for his opinion on the matter.
The bathroom cabinet, when you opened it, was as orderly as everything else — but the pill bottles inside told a slightly different story than the one you'd have liked. Two different over-the-counter painkillers, both half-empty, sitting beside the prescription you'd actually written him, which was nearly full.
"You're not taking what I prescribed."
"Don't need it."
"Then why do you have two separate over-the-counter substitutes that you clearly are taking, in quantities that concern me a great deal more than the prescription would."
He didn't answer immediately, jaw working, and you recognized the particular silence of a man who'd been caught doing exactly the thing he'd been told not to do and was now deciding whether pride or honesty would win out.
"The prescription makes me feel foggy," he said finally, grudging. "Can't train foggy. Can't think foggy. So I just — dealt with it a different way."
"By taking double the recommended dose of two different over-the-counter drugs instead of telling me the prescribed one had side effects you didn't like?"
"…When you say it like that it sounds bad."
"It is bad, Katsuki. That's liver strain on top of a body that's already been through surgery, and it's exactly the kind of thing I need you to tell me instead of quietly solving on your own." You pulled both bottles out, checked the dates, did quick mental math on quantities consumed against days elapsed, and set them on the counter with more force than the moment strictly required. "We're adjusting the prescription. There are options that won't fog you up the same way. But you have to actually tell me what's happening instead of engineering a workaround I don't know about."
"Fine." The word came out clipped, but there was something under it that wasn't quite defensive — something closer to being caught, in a way he clearly didn't enjoy but also, you thought, didn't entirely resent. "I'll tell you next time."
"Good." You capped the reaction there, filing the information away to address properly once you were back at your desk with his chart in front of you, and turned to survey the rest of the small room with fresh eyes. "Grab bar by the shower's a good call, by the way. Whoever installed that."
"I installed that."
You blinked at him. "You installed a grab bar. For yourself. Before I even suggested it."
"Recovery site said it helps with balance during initial post-op weeks. Read it online." He shrugged, like this was nothing, like it hadn't occurred to him that most patients you treated had to be nagged into even the simplest safety accommodations, let alone research and install one unprompted. "Didn't want to fall on my ass in my own shower like an idiot."
You found yourself, absurdly, moved by this — by the quiet, private diligence of a man who complained about every clinical instruction to your face and then, apparently, went home and implemented half of them anyway without telling you, just to avoid looking foolish in front of no one at all.
He followed you the entire time.
That was the part that surprised you most, more than the grab bar, more than the color-coded schedule — not that he tolerated the inspection, which you'd half-expected to have to fight for at every turn, but that he trailed a step behind you through every room without a single genuine complaint, arms crossed, watching you catalogue his own apartment back to him like he found the whole process almost interesting instead of intrusive. Like being paid attention to in this particular, thorough way was a thing he hadn't quite had before and didn't know what to do with except stand very still and let it happen.
You crouched by the coffee table again on your way back through the living room, running your fingers along the sharp edge of it.
"You've got a real fall risk here," you said, "if your balance is still compensating for the right side even occasionally—"
"It's not."
"Katsuki."
"…Fine. Sometimes. When I'm tired. Late at night, mostly, after a long training day." He said it like each word had to be physically extracted from him, and you understood, distantly, that this admission — small as it was — probably cost him more than the collar moment last week had, more than anything he'd told you in the exam room, because this was his own space, his own carefully constructed order, and admitting a flaw in it here felt different than admitting one under fluorescent hospital lighting where flaws were expected.
"Then we move the table," you said, gentler now, "or you put something soft on the corner, or you tell me you're tired before you try to stand up too fast. Any of those work. All of them, ideally."
"I'll move the table."
"Good."
You straightened up, meeting his eyes, and found him already watching you with an expression you didn't entirely have a name for — something quieter than his usual scowl, something that looked almost like he was cataloguing you right back, in exactly the same thorough way you'd been cataloguing his apartment, like turnabout was fair game.
"You do this for all your patients?" he asked. "Crawl around their apartment judging the furniture?"
"Only the ones who don't keep food in their fridge, lie about their balance, and quietly self-medicate instead of telling their doctor there's a problem."
"That's oddly specific."
"You're an oddly specific patient."
Something flickered across his face at that — not quite a smile, but close enough to its shadow that you noticed, and he looked away first, toward the window, toward the plants on the sill that he apparently kept alive out of some stubborn refusal to let anything under his care wither, even accidentally.
"You want tea," he said abruptly, not quite a question, already moving toward the kitchen before you'd answered. "Since you're going to be here a while doing whatever this is."
"I have an actual list to finish."
"You can finish it with tea." It wasn't quite an invitation and wasn't quite an order either, some third thing that belonged only to him, and you found yourself following him into the kitchen instead of protesting further, watching him move around the small space with the same careful precision he brought to everything else — mugs pulled from an actual matching set, water measured rather than eyeballed, the whole process conducted with a kind of quiet competence that told you, more than anything else in the apartment had, exactly how much care he put into things when no one was around to see him do it.
You sat at the small kitchen table while he worked, phone still in hand, finishing the list you'd started — protein, vegetables, fruit that wasn't dried into leather, a note to yourself about the painkiller substitution you'd need to write up properly once you were back at your desk. He set a mug in front of you without comment, sat across from you with his own, and for a moment neither of you said anything at all, the silence settling comfortably instead of awkwardly this time, filled now instead of empty, the quiet of two people who'd simply run out of things that needed saying out loud.
"I'll text you the list," you said eventually, tucking your phone away. "You're actually going to buy it. Not order it and let it sit in a bag on the counter for a week until it goes bad."
"I heard you the first five times you implied I don't take care of myself."
"I haven't implied it. I've been very direct about it, repeatedly, in multiple rooms of your apartment."
"…Yeah." Something in his voice had gone unguarded, just slightly, just enough that you noticed, his thumb tracing an idle line around the rim of his mug instead of meeting your eyes. "You have."
Neither of you said anything else about it. But he walked you to the door when you finally left, hours later than you'd planned, the light outside gone soft and orange with early evening, and he stood in the doorway a beat longer than the occasion required — long enough that you found yourself lingering too, halfway into your shoes, in no particular hurry to close the distance the door would put between you.
"Thanks," he said again, quieter this time, none of the earlier gruffness in it. "For actually looking. Not just checking a box."
"That's the job."
"Wasn't talking about the job." He said it and then looked immediately like he regretted having said it, jaw tightening, gaze sliding somewhere over your shoulder instead of at your face. "Whatever. Text me the list."
"I will." You held his eyes a second longer than professional distance strictly permitted, something warm and unhurried settling low in your chest, and made yourself step back before either of you had to decide what to do with it. "Eat something, Katsuki. Something that isn't a mystery jar from the back of your fridge."
"Throwing that out anyway. It's been there since before the injury."
"That's genuinely concerning information."
"Yeah," he said, something almost like a smile ghosting at the corner of his mouth now. "Probably is."
You left, finally, the door clicking shut softly behind you instead of slamming the way you half-expected everything in his life to, and found yourself, halfway down the hall, still thinking about the photo on his wall and the exact, careful way he'd folded his own laundry for no one but himself to see — a man who built order out of the absence of anyone else to build it for, and who had, apparently, without either of you quite deciding to let it happen, started building a small, quiet space in all of it for you as well.
It happened on a Tuesday, in the unglamorous, fluorescent-lit middle of an administrative afternoon, which felt like exactly the wrong setting for something to shift and exactly the right one for you to actually notice it shifting.
You were three appointments deep into chart cleanup — the unglamorous back half of the job nobody warned you about in medical school, the endless quiet bookkeeping that came after all the actual medicine had been practiced — when you pulled up Bakugo's file to update his post-visit notes from the home assessment and found yourself staring, for a long moment, at a single blank field near the top of the intake form.
Emergency contact / preferred direct line: — not on file —
You frowned at it. Scrolled up. Scrolled down. Checked the secondary tab where hero patients sometimes had a management-office switchboard number filed instead of a personal line, the kind of buffer most top-tier heroes kept between themselves and anyone with their contact information, doctors included. Sure enough, there it was — a generic agency line, the number you'd have had to call, in any real emergency, to be routed through three layers of assistants and a publicist before anyone with actual decision-making power picked up a phone.
Which meant that the number currently sitting in your own personal phone, the one you'd used to send him grocery lists and follow-up questions and, if you were being honest with yourself, one or two texts over the last week that had nothing to do with medicine at all — that number had never actually been entered anywhere official. It existed only where he'd typed it himself, weeks ago, into your phone directly, in a moment you remembered with more clarity than you probably should have.
You remembered it because of the circumstances.
It had been the second night after his surgery, still deep in the fragile early stretch of recovery where every hour mattered, where you'd been the attending pulling consecutive shifts specifically because you didn't trust anyone else to catch the small changes that mattered in a patient whose body ran hotter and harder than anyone else's on the ward. He'd been drifting in and out, still heavily medicated, more honest than he'd ever again let himself be in the weeks since, and at some point past midnight, with half the ward asleep and the machines humming low around him, he'd asked — thick-voiced, barely audible — for your phone.
You'd handed it over without really thinking about it, the reflexive trust of a night that had already stretched past the point of ordinary caution, and he'd typed something into it with clumsy, medicated fingers before handing it back and closing his eyes again.
You hadn't checked what he'd typed until the next morning, in the quiet lull before rounds, and found a contact saved under his own name — no hero moniker, no title, just Katsuki — with a phone number beneath it that you'd assumed, at the time, was simply a courtesy. A way for a notoriously prickly patient to feel some illusion of control over who could reach him directly during a vulnerable stretch. You hadn't thought much of it beyond that. You'd used it exactly as intended: check-ins, appointment reminders, the occasional follow-up question about symptoms he hadn't mentioned in person.
Somewhere along the way, though, the texts had stopped being only that.
You remembered the specific night, three weeks into recovery, when a message from him had come in past eleven — tell your nurse ibara i want her fired, she gave kirishima my chart to read out loud in the waiting room — and you'd laughed out loud, alone, in your own apartment, at a joke he hadn't quite admitted was a joke. You remembered the exchange after that, the slow unspooling of a rhythm neither of you had planned, texts about nothing, texts about training, texts that had nothing to do with his recovery at all and everything to do with the fact that you'd apparently, somewhere in the last month, become people who texted each other.
But none of it, you realized now, staring at the blank field on his chart, had ever been made official. He'd given you his number as a person, quietly, in a moment of medicated vulnerability neither of you had ever directly acknowledged since. He had never given it to you as a doctor. Not on paper. Not where it counted, administratively, as the kind of access that would let hospital staff — let you, specifically, in any professional capacity — reach him directly in a real emergency instead of routing through an agency switchboard that could take twenty minutes to produce an actual human being.
You sat with that distinction for a moment, feeling something complicated move through you — some tangle of professional obligation and a feeling you weren't ready to name pulling in slightly different directions.
Then you opened the intake form properly and began to fill in the field.
Your fingers hovered over the keys for a second before you typed it, some absurd flicker of self-consciousness passing through you at the idea of entering a number you had, by now, memorized without meaning to — the kind of memorization that happens purely through repetition, through checking a name against a saved contact so many times that the digits themselves stop needing the contact card at all.
You typed it in. Confirmed it. Selected personal direct line, patient-authorized from the dropdown, and then, because the software prompted you to, moved down to the next field.
Emergency contact hierarchy — currently populated only with the same generic agency switchboard, followed by a secondary entry for his mother, whose number you'd been given at intake months ago and had never once had cause to use, because he'd never let anything get bad enough, in your care, to require it.
You paused there longer than you had at the first field.
Technically, updating this wasn't strictly required by the home visit alone. Technically, you could have left the emergency contact hierarchy exactly as it was and simply logged his personal line as a supplementary contact method, filed neatly under patient preference rather than touching the more serious architecture of who got called if something went catastrophically wrong.
But you thought, unbidden, of the surgery. Of the specific chaos of that night, the frantic minutes before he'd been wheeled back, the fact that his emergency contact on file at the time had been nothing but that same generic switchboard number, and how long — you remembered this specifically, remembered the particular helpless fury of it — it had taken the hospital's admin staff to get an actual person from his agency on the phone to authorize emergency procedures while you were the one standing in scrubs with his blood on your hands, unable to move forward without a signature from someone who wasn't even in the building.
You were not going to let that particular delay happen again. Not on your watch. Not to a patient you'd fought this hard to keep alive.
You moved your own name up the hierarchy — not above his mother, you weren't overstepping that boundary, but ahead of the agency switchboard, positioned as primary medical contact and secondary emergency contact both, the kind of designation that meant if anything happened to him again, day or night, the hospital would reach you directly and immediately, no twenty-minute wait for a publicist to authorize what should have been authorized the second he came through the doors.
You saved the update. Sat back. Looked at it for a long moment, feeling the particular, quiet weight of what you'd just done settle somewhere in your chest.
It wasn't romantic, you told yourself. It was clinical. It was exactly the kind of thing any competent attending would do for a high-risk patient whose prior emergency contact chain had nearly cost precious minutes during the worst night of his recovery. You would have done it for anyone.
You were aware, even as you thought it, that this wasn't entirely true — that you hadn't done it for anyone else on your patient roster, that there was something in the specific care you'd taken with his file that went beyond the baseline competence you brought to every other chart — but you filed that thought away too, next to several others you'd been filing away for weeks now, and closed the chart before you could examine it further.
He found out three days later, which was faster than you expected, and in a manner you hadn't anticipated at all.
You were mid-appointment, running through his weekly follow-up — mobility continuing to improve, swelling nearly resolved entirely, the collar issue from two weeks prior nothing but a healed line of skin now — when he glanced, apparently idly, at the display screen angled slightly toward him while you updated his chart in real time.
"What's that," he said, nodding at the screen.
"Chart update."
"No, that." He pointed, more specifically this time, at the small section of the display currently showing the emergency contact hierarchy you'd revised the week before. "Since when am I calling you for emergencies."
You felt your face do something you immediately tried to control. "That's not — you're not calling me. That's the hospital's protocol. If something happens and you can't consent yourself, that's who gets contacted, in order, to authorize decisions on your behalf."
"And you put yourself second. Ahead of the agency."
"The agency took twenty minutes to authorize your surgery consent the night you came in," you said, matter-of-fact, though you could feel your pulse doing something faster than the statement warranted. "Twenty minutes we didn't strictly have to spare. I wasn't going to let that happen again if I could help it."
He was quiet for a second, processing that, something working behind his eyes that you couldn't quite read.
"You had my number before that, though," he said slowly. "Officially, I mean. On paper."
"No," you admitted. "I didn't. You gave it to me — personally, I mean, the night after surgery — but it was never actually entered into your file. I only just noticed the gap this week, when I went back through your chart after the home visit."
"Huh." He sat with that for a second, something shifting subtly across his expression — not quite surprise, but close to it, the particular stillness of a man recalibrating a fact he'd apparently assumed was settled for weeks. "So this whole time you've had it saved under, what, personal contacts? Not even in the system?"
"Personal contacts," you confirmed, feeling your ears go warm despite every effort not to let them. "Under your actual name. Not the hero one."
"I remember giving you that," he said, quieter now, something almost thoughtful in it. "Barely. I was pretty out of it."
"You were. I wasn't sure you'd even remember doing it, honestly."
"I remember." He looked at you directly then, something steady and unhurried in it that made you very aware of the small distance between the exam chair and where you stood. "Wanted you to have a way to reach me that wasn't going through six people who don't actually know anything about my condition. Figured if something went wrong again, I'd rather you be the one making the call instead of some publicist reading off a script."
You didn't have an immediate response to that, something warm and complicated moving through your chest at the plain, unadorned honesty of it — the kind of honesty he rarely offered outright, usually burying anything sincere under enough sarcasm that you had to dig for it. This time there was no digging required. He'd just said it.
"Well," you said, finally, clearing your throat and turning back to the chart to give your hands something to do. "Now it's official. Which means—"
"Which means what."
"Which means," you said, glancing back at him, "I'm now legally, administratively, hospital-system-approved allowed to bother you. Whenever I want. About your health, obviously."
Something shifted across his face — not quite a smile, but its close relative, the particular expression he wore when he'd decided something was funny but hadn't fully committed to admitting it out loud.
"So now you're legally allowed to bother me," he repeated, dry, testing the phrase like he was deciding how much space to give it.
"That's right."
"Great. Should've made me sign a waiver."
"I'll draft one." You kept your tone light, professional, even as something under it hummed with an energy that had nothing to do with paperwork. "For the record, though—"
"For the record?"
"I've been bothering you for weeks," you said. "Officially or not. This just makes it paperwork-approved."
He huffed something that was almost a laugh, shaking his head slightly, and you caught, for just a second, the corner of his mouth pulling up before he pressed it back into his usual flat line.
"…Fair," he said, and the single word carried more concession in it than you were sure he intended to give away.
The conversation should have ended there. It didn't, not entirely, because something about the exchange had loosened a thread neither of you had quite pulled on before, and the appointment settled into a different rhythm for the rest of its length — less clinical interrogation, more of the easy back-and-forth that had crept into your text exchanges over the last few weeks and had, apparently, decided to make an appearance in person as well.
"So what else is in there," he said, nodding at the chart again as you finished typing up his mobility notes. "In the file. Since apparently you've been quietly rearranging my emergency contacts behind my back."
"It's not behind your back, I'm telling you right now."
"After the fact."
"After the fact," you allowed, "but I'm telling you. That counts for something."
"Barely." But there was no real heat in it. "What else is in there."
"Standard stuff. Vitals history. Medication list — updated, by the way, since you decided to self-medicate with over-the-counter substitutes instead of telling me the prescription made you foggy."
"That was one time."
"That was every day for two weeks, according to the bottles I found in your bathroom cabinet."
He grumbled something under his breath, unwilling to concede that point directly, and you continued scrolling through the file with a faint, private smile you didn't bother hiding this time.
"Recovery milestones. Home safety assessment notes — the coffee table's still in the chart, by the way, flagged as addressed since you said you'd move it."
"I moved it."
"I know. You sent me a picture. Unprompted." You glanced up at him, eyebrow raised. "Which, for the record, is not a thing most patients do."
"You said it was a hazard. I fixed the hazard. Seemed relevant to send proof."
"It was oddly thorough of you."
"I'm a thorough person." He said it with such flat, deadpan conviction that you had to fight down an actual laugh, because it was, in its own strange way, entirely true — thorough in his training schedule, thorough in his folded laundry, thorough, apparently, in documenting his own compliance with medical advice down to unsolicited photographic evidence.
"You are," you agreed. "It's a good look on you. The compliance, I mean. Doesn't happen often."
"Don't get used to it."
"I never do." You closed the chart, finally, the appointment technically over several minutes ago now, though neither of you had made much move toward ending it. "Speaking of the file, though — I should probably ask. Officially, this time, instead of finding out by accident. Is there anyone else you want listed? Family, I mean. In case something happens and your mother's not reachable."
Something in his expression shifted, some old, complicated weight passing briefly behind his eyes before he answered. "Old man's not really — we're not close like that. Mom's the one who'd actually show up. Kirishima's got a standing agreement to be the one who calls people if she can't be reached fast enough, but that's not exactly official, just something we worked out ourselves after—" He stopped, jaw tightening slightly. "After a bad one. A while back."
"I can add Kirishima," you said, gentle, not pushing on the thing he'd trailed off from, filing it away instead as something you might ask about later, in a quieter moment, if he ever wanted to bring it up himself. "Officially. Same tier as your mother, if you want. So it's not just an informal agreement anymore."
He looked at you for a long moment, something unreadable and a little unsteady behind the usual sharp edges of his expression.
"…Yeah," he said finally. "Do that."
"Consider it done." You made the note right there, while he watched, adding Kirishima's contact information to the hierarchy beside his mother's, and something about doing it in front of him — openly, transparently, instead of quietly amending his file behind closed doors the way you had with your own contact information — felt like its own small correction, a way of making sure this time he knew exactly what was being written down and why.
"You're good at this," he said, once you'd finished, watching you with an expression that had gone entirely open in a way you weren't quite prepared for. "The doctor thing. Not just the medicine part. The — paying attention part. Noticing what actually needs fixing instead of just what's on the chart."
"That's the job."
"You said that last time too." Something wry crept back into his voice, familiar footing reasserting itself. "About the apartment. 'That's the job.' Feels like you say that whenever you don't want to admit you actually care."
You opened your mouth to argue and found, embarrassingly, that you didn't have an immediate rebuttal, because he wasn't wrong, not entirely, and the two of you both seemed to recognize the small, quiet trap of the observation at exactly the same moment.
"Maybe," you allowed, finally. "Doesn't mean it's not still true. It is the job. It's also—" You stopped yourself before finishing the sentence, some instinct for professional distance kicking in a half-second too late to actually stop you from starting it.
"It's also what."
"Nothing. Never mind."
"You can't just trail off like that."
"Watch me," you said, standing, gathering the chart, putting a physical end to the moment before either of you could push it any further than it had already gone. "You're cleared. Same as last week — light training, no patrol, come back in seven days so I can hear about whatever new grocery-related crime you've committed in the meantime."
"I bought the groceries," he said, standing as well, following you toward the door with an ease that had become entirely familiar over the last month. "For the record."
"All of them?"
"Most of them."
"Katsuki."
"I bought the important ones," he said, which was, you suspected, going to be the final answer you got on the subject, and you let it go, because arguing about vegetables felt like the wrong note to end on after everything else the appointment had quietly rearranged.
He paused at the door again, the way he always did now, the small habitual hesitation that had become its own kind of ritual between you.
"Hey," he said, before you could say goodbye. "The number thing. In the file. I meant what I said — glad it's you that gets called first, if something happens again."
"It won't happen again," you said, quieter than you meant to. "Not if I can help it."
"Yeah." Something steady and certain in the single word. "I know."
He left. You stood in the empty exam room a moment longer than the moment required, phone in your coat pocket suddenly feeling heavier than it had that morning, weighted now with something that had, weeks ago, been nothing more than a number typed clumsily into your contacts by a barely-conscious patient in the middle of the night, and had become, somewhere in the quiet accumulation of appointments and text messages and grocery lists and folded laundry, something you were no longer sure how to file under the job alone.
You updated the chart one final time before closing it for the day, adding a single line to your own private notes that had nothing to do with mobility scores or medication schedules:
Patient continues to show strong engagement with care team. Note: emergency contact hierarchy revised and finalized with patient's full knowledge and consent.
You looked at that sentence for a long moment, the careful, clinical language of it doing exactly the same quiet work it always did — saying something true, and saying it in a way that left the rest of the truth comfortably, deliberately unsaid.
You knew this with the particular, useless clarity of hindsight, standing at the nurses' station somewhere around six in the evening with a headache building steadily behind your left eye and a stack of charts that had multiplied, seemingly of their own accord, over the course of a double shift you hadn't planned to work until someone called in sick at four that morning and you'd said yes before you'd fully processed what you were agreeing to.
It happened more than you liked to admit. Not carelessness, exactly — you were careful about everything else, careful about medication dosages and surgical margins and the exact wording you used when delivering hard news to frightened families in quiet rooms. But your own meals had a way of sliding down the priority list on days like this, shoved aside by whatever emergency currently occupied the space where lunch should have gone, until the hunger itself stopped registering as hunger and started registering, instead, as the low, familiar pressure gathering at your temples.
You rubbed at one temple now, absently, eyes still on the chart in front of you, and didn't notice the way your other hand had drifted up to press against your forehead until a voice cut through the fluorescent hum of the station.
"You skipped lunch."
You looked up. Bakugo was standing at the edge of the nurses' station, gym bag slung over one shoulder, still in the loose training clothes he wore to physical therapy, a paper takeout bag held in one hand like it was the least remarkable thing in the world for him to be carrying.
"…How do you know?"
"You get headaches." He said it flatly, like reciting a fact from a textbook. "When you skip meals. You get that face."
"I don't have a face."
"You have a face." He set the bag down on the counter between you, unbothered by your protest, and nodded at your hand, still pressed against your temple. "You rub your temples. Both sides, usually, but you started on the left today, which means it's been building a while. You do it in this specific little circle motion, like you're trying to physically push it back in."
You stared at him.
"…I counted," he added, almost as an afterthought, like this was a perfectly ordinary thing to admit. "Three times in the last twenty minutes. Watched you do it walking past this station on my way in from PT."
You continued to stare at him, something warm and unsteady moving through your chest that had nothing to do with the headache at all.
He noticed things. That was the plain, uncomplicated truth of it, standing there in front of you with a bag of takeout he'd apparently thought to bring on nothing more than the accumulated evidence of your own tired, distracted body language — the same quiet, careful attention he brought to his own recovery, to his folded laundry, to the grab bar he'd installed in his shower before you'd even suggested it, turned now, deliberately, in your direction.
"You didn't have to do this," you said finally, because it was the only thing you could think to say that wasn't going to give away exactly how much the gesture had rearranged something in your chest.
"I know I didn't have to." He was already pulling containers out of the bag, setting them out on the counter with the same unhurried efficiency he brought to everything. "Did it anyway. Sit down before you fall over."
"I'm not going to fall over."
"You fell asleep at your desk two months ago. Kirishima had to wake you up because you didn't answer your phone for four hours and I made him go check because I—" He stopped, jaw working, the sentence trailing off into something he apparently hadn't meant to say out loud, and you felt your own breath catch slightly at the memory he was clearly circling, the one from weeks ago, before either of you had quite named whatever this was becoming.
You remembered that night too. You remembered the exhaustion of a brutal shift, the way you'd sat down at your desk for what you'd meant to be five minutes and woken up nearly four hours later to Kirishima's face hovering with real concern above you, and a string of increasingly worried texts on your phone that had started out casual — you good? — and escalated, by the third hour of silence, into something closer to genuine alarm. You remembered, too, the text that had come through once you'd finally responded, blearily, apologizing for worrying anyone.
text me when you get home. actually there this time. not asleep at your desk. i mean it.
You'd done it. Every night since, more or less, a small habitual message sent the second your key turned in your own front door, sometimes nothing more than home, sometimes a longer recap of the day, but always something, because he'd asked, plainly, without pretense, and you'd found yourself wanting to give him that small reassurance more than you'd examined too closely at the time.
"You made Kirishima check on me," you said now, quiet, something in your chest going soft at the confirmation of a thing you'd suspected but never actually had spelled out.
"Wasn't going to sit there not knowing if you were okay." He said it like it settled the matter, already unpacking the second container, steam curling up from something that smelled, distantly, like the noodle place two blocks from your apartment that you'd mentioned exactly once in a text weeks ago and apparently he'd remembered. "So now, when you skip lunch and start rubbing your temples like you're trying to solve a physics problem with your own skull, I bring food. Cuts out the whole middle step where you almost pass out and someone has to come find you."
"That happened one time."
"Once is enough times." He pushed one of the containers toward you, along with a set of chopsticks still in their paper sleeve. "Eat. Chart later."
You ate.
You hadn't fully registered how hungry you actually were until the first bite hit your tongue — something warm and savory, exactly the kind of thing your body had apparently been quietly begging for over the last several hours while your brain remained too preoccupied with other people's charts to notice its own basic maintenance requirements. You made an involuntary sound of relief around the first mouthful that made him glance up from his own container with something that might, on anyone else's face, have been a smile.
"Good?"
"Very good. Where's this from?"
"Place near your apartment. You mentioned it a few weeks back. Said the broth was better than the one closer to the hospital." He said it without any particular weight to it, like remembering an offhand comment from weeks ago was simply a thing that happened, not a thing that required acknowledgment, and you found yourself looking at him a beat too long before returning your attention to the food, something in your chest doing a slow, warm turn you didn't have the energy to examine properly right now.
You ate in silence for a while after that — comfortable silence, the kind that had become its own small language between you over the last several weeks, filled with nothing more than the quiet clink of chopsticks against paper containers and the low hum of the nurses' station around you, half-empty this late in the evening, most of the day shift long gone home.
"You should sit down more," he said eventually, breaking the silence without any real urgency behind it. "During shifts. Not just eat standing up at a counter like this is a war zone."
"Sometimes it is a war zone."
"Then that's exactly when you need to sit down and eat something instead of running on empty." He said it simply, no lecture in it, just fact laid flat on the table between you the way he laid out everything else that mattered to him — plainly, without decoration. "Can't take care of anyone else if you're the one who's about to keel over."
"That's rich, coming from the man whose fridge I found completely empty three weeks ago."
"I fixed that."
"You fixed some of that. You told me yourself you only bought the important ones."
"The important ones are the ones that matter," he said, entirely unbothered by the correction, and you let out a short laugh despite yourself, shaking your head, the headache behind your eye already receding now that food and something like company had settled into the space where exhaustion had been sitting alone.
The conversation drifted, eventually, the way it always did now when you had time to let it — away from food, away from the hospital, into the kind of easy, meandering territory that belonged only to the two of you, built slowly over weeks of texts and appointments and one very memorable afternoon spent cataloguing hazards in his apartment.
"I watched something last night," he said, apropos of nothing, still working through his own container. "Documentary. About deep sea stuff. Anglerfish, mostly."
"You watch a lot of those."
"They're good. Better than whatever's on regular TV." He said it with real conviction, the same flat certainty he brought to training theory and hero reports. "Anglerfish are insane, by the way. The males are basically parasites. Fuse into the female's body permanently. Whole thing's brutal."
"That's a genuinely horrifying fact to bring up over dinner."
"It's interesting."
"It's horrifying and interesting. Both things can be true." You pushed a piece of something around your container, fighting down a smile. "Why do you like these so much? The documentaries, I mean."
He considered the question longer than you expected, chopsticks pausing mid-air.
"Facts don't lie to you," he said finally. "Don't perform. Don't need anything from you. An anglerfish doesn't care if you're impressed by it. It just does the thing it does, because that's what it does. There's something — I don't know. Restful, about that. About things just being exactly what they are, all the way down, no bullshit version underneath it."
You looked at him for a long moment, something in the observation landing harder than he'd probably intended, because it explained so much at once — the color-coded schedule, the folded laundry, the careful, methodical way he moved through his own recovery, the plain, undecorated honesty he'd offered you in the exam room about wanting you to have his number in case something went wrong again. A man who trusted facts precisely because people had, at some point, taught him not to trust performance, and who had built, out of that mistrust, an entire private architecture of things that simply were what they were.
"That's the least sarcastic thing you've ever said to me," you told him, quiet.
"Don't tell anyone. Ruins my reputation."
"Your secret's safe."
He kept going, unprompted, launching into some further explanation of anglerfish reproductive biology that was, in fact, exactly as horrifying as he'd promised, delivered with the same deadpan seriousness he might have used to explain a training regimen, and something about the specific combination — the gruesome subject matter, the utter sincerity of his interest in it, the fact that he'd apparently spent an entire evening alone watching fish documentaries and had been waiting, in some small way, to tell you about it — struck you as so purely, uncomplicatedly him that you laughed. Properly laughed, not the polite kind, the real kind that came up from somewhere low in your chest and caught you slightly off guard with its own force.
He stopped talking.
You didn't notice at first, still laughing, wiping at the corner of one eye, and it was only when the silence stretched a beat too long that you looked up and found him watching you with an expression that had gone entirely still — not blank, not guarded, just quiet, focused, like you were the single most interesting thing he'd encountered all week, more interesting, even, than the anglerfish.
"What?" you asked, self-conscious now, the laugh fading into something more uncertain.
"Nothing." He looked back down at his food a half-second too late to make the deflection convincing. "Keep eating."
You didn't push it. Neither of you commented on it — not the laugh, not the way he'd watched it happen like he was trying to memorize the shape of it, not the small, warm silence that settled afterward, comfortable in a way that had stopped feeling professional weeks ago and had never quite found a new name to replace it with. You simply picked your chopsticks back up, and he did the same, and the conversation drifted on to something else — his physical therapy that afternoon, a mobility milestone he'd hit ahead of schedule, some minor complaint about Kirishima's continued incompetence at every video game he touched — easy, unhurried, the kind of conversation that filled time without needing to accomplish anything beyond simply existing between two people who'd stopped needing a reason to be in the same room.
You finished eating slower than you meant to, the headache gone entirely now, replaced by the pleasant, loose-limbed tiredness of a body that had finally gotten what it needed, and looked up at the clock only when a passing nurse reminded you, gently, that you still had two charts left before you could clock out.
"I should finish up," you said, reluctant in a way you didn't bother disguising anymore.
"Yeah." He was already gathering the empty containers, stacking them with the same neat precision he brought to everything, folding the takeout bag down into a small, tidy square before tossing it toward the nearest bin with an ease that suggested years of practice at not missing. "I've got an early session tomorrow anyway. Should head out."
"Thank you," you said, quieter now, meaning it more than the two words could really carry. "For this. For noticing."
"Told you. I counted." Something almost soft in the deflection this time, none of the earlier bite behind it. "Just eat lunch tomorrow. Save us both the trouble."
"I'll try."
"Try harder than that."
"Katsuki."
"Fine. I'll just bring food again if you don't." He said it like a threat and it landed like something else entirely, warm and unhurried, settling low in your chest the way most things he said to you did lately, and you found yourself smiling at your own charts for a full ten seconds after he said it, entirely unable to stop.
He left not long after, gym bag slung back over one shoulder, pausing at the end of the hallway the way he always did now — that small, habitual hesitation, half a look back that neither of you ever acknowledged out loud — before finally disappearing around the corner toward the exit.
You finished your charts. You went home, eventually, hours later than planned, and texted him the moment your key turned in the lock, same as always. Home. Headache's gone. Thank you again.
The reply came fast enough that you suspected he'd been waiting for it.
good. eat something tomorrow before i have to start bringing a whole meal plan.
You fell asleep smiling at your phone, which was, you were dimly aware even as exhaustion pulled you under, becoming something of a pattern.
— Katsuki —
He didn't leave right away.
He told himself it was because his session tomorrow really was early, that there was no reason to linger in an empty hospital hallway at seven in the evening when his own apartment and his own bed were a twenty-minute walk away. That was the story he gave himself, anyway, standing at the end of the corridor with his gym bag heavy on one shoulder, looking back through the glass partition at the nurses' station where she'd already turned back to her charts, hair falling forward as she bent over the paperwork, the empty takeout containers he'd just thrown away the only evidence that he'd been standing there at all twenty minutes ago.
He stood there a beat too long. Long enough that a passing orderly gave him a curious glance on the way past, long enough that he became aware of his own stillness and made himself turn, finally, and walk toward the exit doors.
It wasn't the first time he'd felt it. He recognized the shape of it now, familiar in an uncomfortable way — the same low, unplaceable feeling that had caught him off guard weeks ago in a coffee shop that neither of them had ever quite named out loud as anything more than a coincidence, watching her laugh at something stupid he'd said, watching the way it changed her whole face, open and unguarded in a way she never quite let herself be during appointments, and feeling something in his own chest respond to it that he hadn't had a category for at the time.
This was the same feeling. Except it wasn't the same at all — it was sharper now, heavier, settled somewhere deeper than it had been in the coffee shop, built up slowly over weeks of texts and appointments and an entire evening spent letting her catalogue every hazard in his apartment like she had every right to be there, checking his shower for a grab bar he'd already installed just so he wouldn't disappoint her, telling her about anglerfish because some stupid, unguarded part of him had wanted to hear her laugh again and had been willing to sacrifice his own dignity to a horrifying fish fact to get it.
He pushed through the exit doors into the cool evening air and didn't look back again, mostly because he suspected, if he did, he'd find himself standing there another twenty minutes doing absolutely nothing useful with the feeling except letting it sit in his chest and grow.
Good. Eat something tomorrow before I have to start bringing a whole meal plan, he typed, once he was three blocks away and had convinced himself the distance made it safe to look at his phone again.
He sent it. Pocketed the phone. Kept walking, the city going quiet and orange around him in the last light of evening, and didn't examine, too closely, why the walk home suddenly felt shorter than it used to — or why some small, stubborn, previously silent part of him had already started counting down the days until he'd see her again.
