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Shouto's still asleep.
No surprise. Especially not on a weekend.
Katsuki's awake, and that's no surprise either.
It's dim, the sun only barely starting to push through the drawn curtains. Everything is still coloured in greys and blues, twilight hours. He usually doesn't linger in bed like this; waking up has always been easy to him, and the urge to start doing things almost immediate.
But it's not very often that Shouto ends up sleeping over in Katsuki's bed. He hasn't had the chance to memorise his sleeping face the way he has his confused one, or his determined one, or his focused one, or—
There's so many, if you know how to look for them. The twitch of an eyebrow, the quirk of a lip. And Katsuki's made himself know.
So instead of getting himself up and moving, he leans on his elbows and watches.
Shouto's hair, usually split right in half, is tangled together down the middle. It fans out a bit over the pillow, falling over his eyes. His face is burrowed into the pillow, mouth slightly open, covers pulled up around his shoulders.
For all that he comes off as stoic, Shouto's face usually has something in it. Concentration as he's steadily working through maths equations, fond exasperation as he listens to Deku ramble and ramble and ramble, something like nostalgia when he eats his dumb cold soba, always something for Katsuki to rifle through and add to the corner reserved for Shouto inside his head.
(A corner. More like his entire skull at this point, the bone plastered over with bento boxes and well-aimed punches and I fucking like you, Half an' Half. D'you wanna go out? like a bedroom, except the band posters and the clothes on the floor all belong to a very special airhead.
A corner. Right.)
Sleeping, though, Shouto’s face is blank, nothing weighing on his eyes, and that's a different kind of abundance for Katsuki to collect; memorise the image in printer paper and hang it up between their impromptu date last Wednesday after school and Really? Okay. I like you too. Too much, maybe. One more thing to think about in class when he should be concentrating, at night when he should be sleeping.
And then Katsuki, as he's counting the eyelashes he can see between Shouto's strands of hair, suddenly realises how very human Shouto is.
See, Katsuki does all his literature reading for school, and he's read a few books that Shouto shoved into his hands because he loved them, and the thing that always shows up when people are talking about beauty is Earth.
Lips like roses. Eyes blue like the sea. Teeth like pearls.
But Shouto's—Shouto; and it's weird, how Katsuki could make all the comparisons he wanted to, Shouto's skin to lace or his hair to snow, but violin strings could not be tendons in his thin wrists. Canyons do not settle underneath his scars. Bones are bones are not grown in dirt, do not have roots, and yet—
And yet. He's got Katsuki in the palms of his hands.
Human bodies aren't earth. They're bloodier than that, gentler, full of bones and muscle to pack into full moons and such, so that other people who listen can have some semblance of understanding, that this person's laugh is not just a laugh, but more, and the closest they'll get to knowing is to compare it to windchimes. Uniquely raw.
Maybe that's why there's always been portraits, poems, endless photographs; immortalisation, on and on and on and on, to have people remembered and held in ink pots and painter's canvases and digital traces. So that it won't be lost. One of the few constants stretched across each era. It's I love you and it's I could detail every petal in a flower field, but I choose your hair and your smile instead. Katsuki tries to imagine it coming from his own mouth.
It's an eternal type of worship, really, each person with their own god. They spend their lives kneeling at someone's altar. They seek out simplicity and brilliance and yearning, all to watch this person's sleep-sappy smile or brush the hair from their face. A body is so unlike mountains, or sunsets, or ocean salt.
(And really, Katsuki thinks he could be one of these people, seeking penance and understanding and good at Shouto's hand. Any place he stepped could become a church, and Katsuki seated at a pew. There are perpetual ink stains on his nails, and his nose is a little crooked, and Katsuki can see the ribs through Shouto's skin when he lifts his arms, and all of this is better than any view Katsuki ever found gazing at the stars. Maybe he'll be asked how his life was spent one day, if the bruised knees were worth it. He will answer that he spent it staring; that, though they are not the only bruises he was ever glad to have, they are the only ones that burrow skin, vein, heart-deep.
The thing is, Katsuki's never been religious.
But if anyone was to convince him that angels exist, he thinks he could consider Shouto living proof.)
So he could say that Shouto has sunshine in his eyes, but the truer words would be that the sun is something of a thief and it takes after Shouto first. The entire truth would be that the sun has nothing to do with it, because Shouto is solely himself and all the better for it. That brightness, those extremes from gentle warmth to burning heat, are purely him.
Katsuki spends a while in bed, staring. (Worshipping.)
Eventually though, he has to get moving, because Earth doesn't stop spinning, not even for things that deserve it. Carefully, he lifts himself up and climbs over Shouto to get off the bed, because it turns out that Halfie's one of those starfish people that likes to splay out. Would be annoying, if Katsuki didn't find it cute. If he cared more about that than Shouto being comfortable.
Keeping quiet so as not to disturb the lump of a person hiding under his covers, Katsuki gets himself ready the same as he always does for his run. Business as usual, except that the light streaming through the windows is significantly lighter than it normally is and Four-Eyes is probably already out, meaning they won't bump into each other in the kitchen.
And one more difference. Small, really.
Just before Katsuki heads out of his room after getting changed into his running clothes, he pauses and turns and takes a few more seconds looking at the figure asleep on his bed. Like one of those horribly sappy couples, who are always tangled up together and you look at and think They'll be okay, (because call him naïve, call him hopeless, call him dangerously optimistic, Katsuki really believes that they will) Katsuki bends down and kisses Shouto on the cheek.
Shouto doesn't stir, but Katsuki feels good having done it anyway. He thinks that's how love like this is supposed to work.
(See, some people chase storms. Some people chase rainbows. Some people chase ever-changing horizons, ever-winding roads, never getting anywhere and never gaining anything but new ground tracked.
And there is worth in that. Sure there is. The planet has a lot to offer, and it's made to be explored. To be seen and heard and felt, to be lived in, both in the roughest thunderstorms with rain that feels like inside cleansing, in the softest soil where one can rest without weight on their back, nestled like a child in the weeds. Those things should be found.
But given the choice, Katsuki would chase Shouto instead.
Because Shouto makes him feel achingly human. Human in blood and guts and a heart that he's finally learning to acknowledge, to tend to, to bare as his own; because even if it still makes him want to run and shout sometimes, just how vulnerable he really is on the inside, it doesn't feel quite so embarrassing when Shouto holds it with hands as soft as his.
He's been getting better with it, he thinks. Day by day. Shouto's good at making people believe in things like that.
So yes, they'll be okay, no matter what this gorgeous clusterfuck of a world throws at them; because Katsuki just loves Shouto's eyes. Not moons, not stars, not oceans or flames.
Eyes.)