Archive of Our Own

The first time it happens, it’s a consequence of the curse known as academic responsibilities.

“I shouldn’t have brought you here.”

Wakatoshi looks up from the centrifuge machine placed at the end of the table. 

“Why not?”

The lab is pristine and smells like bleach and Wakatoshi just doesn’t look the part. The lab coat he’s wearing is too tight around his shoulders, the goggles look ridiculous on him, and he doesn’t have the over-caffeinated, sleep deprived, nihilistic glow to him characteristic of college students right before finals week.

“You just… evidently don’t belong in this place. Sit over here, I’m scared you’re gonna break something.”

“I could study here,” Wakatoshi tells him, walking around the long table. “Sports medicine or something of the sort.”

“Which also wouldn’t give you credentials to walk into this lab,” Kiyoomi says under his breath. That’s the problem, really. If Kiyoomi didn’t know him, he’d immediately jump to conclusions. The conclusions being that Wakatoshi is one of those very dumb, very sexy student athletes who have never seen a test tube in their lives. “Behave. I’ll be done soon.”

Wakatoshi moves to stand directly behind him. He smells clean, like gym-provided soap. His entire self is a distraction. You’re not supposed to allow distractions into a place full of expensive machinery and flammable liquids. Kiyoomi frowns and tries to go back to labeling material and sealing plastic bags with gloved hands. 

Then, because the gods enjoy putting their human creations through trials and tribulations, Wakatoshi presses a lightning-quick kiss to Kiyoomi’s shoulder, which leaves him two centimeters away from his ear when he says, “Okay. I’ll be good.” 

Something ties itself into a knot at Kiyoomi’s very core. He really shouldn’t have let Wakatoshi in here. He doesn’t even notice him moving back to sit on his assigned chair, he doesn’t notice anything whatsoever. Maybe it won’t be Wakatoshi who sets the lab on fire, maybe it’ll be Kiyoomi. He could press the tip of one ear to an open bottle of ethanol and the whole place would blow up in a split second.

He uncaps the marker he didn’t realize he had capped and keeps filling in the labels. Kiyoomi has heard calligraphy is therapeutic. He spends two full seconds writing down each individual line of each individual kanji, hoping it therapizes the shit out of him.

Once he’s done, he changes his gloves, prepares a cotton swab, and turns around. Wakatoshi has his elbows on his knees, the goggles now dangling from one of his fingers. He lifts his head and straightens up when he hears the rustle of Kiyoomi’s clothes. 

Kiyoomi takes two steps in his direction.

“Open up,” he says.

Wakatoshi eyes the swab hovering in front of his lips, then simply lets his mouth drop open.

Kiyoomi takes a second—or ten, he doesn’t know, time is a human invention that loses relevance when men who are older and stronger and bigger and in love with you are in the picture—to process and fully internalize the fact that future Olympian Ushijima Wakatoshi is referred to as a heavy piece of artillery that shoots out iron spheres packed with gunpowder, but also opens his mouth on command just because Kiyoomi asked him for help with his homework. 

The devil on his shoulder—Komori—goes if he said he was gonna help, what else were you expecting him to do? Not open it? Kiyoomi growls at him to let him have this and flicks him away.

When he doesn’t immediately shove the cotton swab into Wakatoshi’s mouth, Wakatoshi stops staring straight ahead and looks up, up at him, and—would you look at that, it’s infinitely worse. His seated position makes Wakatoshi’s head go up to about Kiyoomi’s navel. The white overhead lights turn his eyes bright green, and his cheekbones are dusted pink but only slightly, and his lower lip is spit-slick, and Kiyoomi? Well.

Kiyoomi should’ve listened to his more impulsive side and dropped this class the minute they told him it wasn’t theoretical and he had to do real, actual lab work. But there were no other available electives that met his program’s requirements, and he’d be missing credits, and—this isn’t his fault, okay? Under different circumstances, he would tangle his fingers in Wakatoshi’s hair and pull his head further back, but not now when Wakatoshi is doing this just so Kiyoomi can attempt to sequence his DNA and pass this class, and then graduate college, and then ditch it all to join the V.League and play volleyball against him again, this time professionally.

He grabs Wakatoshi’s chin with his left hand—unnecessary, absolutely no need for that—then swipes the swab against the inside of his cheek a few times. Before moving away to store and label it, he presses harder on Wakatoshi’s jaw, pushes his mouth closed, taps at his bottom lip with his thumb. He needs to get the fuck out of here.

Kiyoomi speeds through the labeling and washing and cleaning, then drags Wakatoshi over to take the college student disguise off him. He’s wearing the goggles again.

“You’re insufferable,” Kiyoomi tells him, unbuttoning his lab coat. Wakatoshi stands still and watches him, lets him push the fabric off his shoulders with his lips stretched into a tiny smile—which, Kiyoomi would like to know what’s so amusing about turning your loved ones into a fire hazard. He considers the possibility that Wakatoshi might be high on bleach fumes.

“What did I do?”

“I really hate the person the lab gear turned you into.”

Wakatoshi’s hands curl over the hem of Kiyoomi’s hoodie as Kiyoomi pulls the safety goggles off him.

“This was fun,” Wakatoshi says, pulling him closer.

It was not fun. If Kiyoomi ever needs a favor like this again, he will go through the embarrassment of just posting an announcement on his university’s Facebook page and use a Loft gift card as bait to lure freshmen in. He’d rather collect tubes of a stranger’s spit than start thinking of the lab as not actually a terrible potential place to have sex in. “Let me know if you need me again, I would be glad to help.”

“You’re joking. I’m never letting you into this room ever again.” He plants a kiss on Wakatoshi’s bottom lip, then pulls him out of the lab to a safer place, somewhere Wakatoshi doesn’t feel the need to risk both their lives by muttering nonsense like I’ll be good into his ear and also having the softest lips in human history. “Let’s go.”

+++++

One day Kiyoomi will break into Wakatoshi’s apartment and make him dinner and run him a bath and sprinkle rose petals all over his bed. 

Today is not that day.

Today Kiyoomi broke into Wakatoshi’s apartment because he has a bigger kitchen than the one available at the dorms, and Kiyoomi needs exactly that, since he is on a mission to beat his cousin at replicating the internationally acclaimed McDonald’s baked apple pie. 

“Is everything okay?” Wakatoshi asks him when he detaches himself from Kiyoomi’s lips at the genkan. “You look slightly out of it.”

And—of course Kiyoomi looks a little out of it. He spent the entire afternoon concocting five different recipes for the filling, another five recipes for the crust, and then he organized everything in plates and little cups and set it on Wakatoshi’s kitchen counter with lab precision. His back hurts from standing up, and his t-shirt—Wakatoshi’s t-shirt that he borrowed without permission—is covered in sticky molten sugar stains. 

The heat and vapor from the kitchen started making Kiyoomi look like what he imagines an alchemist who hasn’t seen the light of day in three months looks like. So he put on Wakatoshi’s Adlers headband in an attempt at making his hair look less unreasonable, which did nothing to make him look less like an alchemist who hasn’t seen the light of day in three months. Except instead of transmuting matter into gold he’s just trying to make some fucking apple pie.

Then Wakatoshi came home from practice—

(Kiyoomi has never actually broken into Wakatoshi’s apartment. It’s not breaking in if the owner texted you the entry code two seconds after signing the contract that made the place into his property. Which Wakatoshi did.)

—and kissed him at the genkan and said you taste sweet, and then took his time licking the sugary apple taste from Kiyoomi’s mouth, and it was like he’d put Kiyoomi’s brain in a blender and left it with a consistency not unlike the one of the sweet chopped apples occupying every cup Wakatoshi owns on the counter.

So yes. Kiyoomi might look a little out of it, and nobody can blame him for it.

“Wanna be my test subject?” he asks once he remembers how to form words, lips red and staticky. 

“Yes,” Wakatoshi answers, because he’s kind like that. “Is this a sex thing?”

“No, but you sure agreed quickly for someone who didn’t know if it was.”

Wakatoshi shrugs. “I would say yes then too. Because it’s you asking.”

Kiyoomi walks past Wakatoshi, kisses his shoulder and says good to know, and pretends like he’s immune to the sticky saccharine syrupy sweetness of it all, taste, smell, words, and company.

Here’s what Kiyoomi does after this: he sits Wakatoshi on one of the bar stools by the counter and feeds him different combinations of crust and apple pie filling. Here’s the problem with that: Kiyoomi has to deal with a full hour of Wakatoshi sucking at the tips of his fingers. 

He immediately thinks of those calculations that give you an estimate of the amount of time you spend engaging in one single activity throughout your life. Like, when someone tells you that you spend about an entire year of your life commuting. And when you hear stuff like that you immediately imagine commuting for an entire year all at once, and you think that’s not right, it would kill a person to commute for a whole year. 

This, right now, is exactly that. Kiyoomi just experienced a lifetime’s worth of shoving his fingers into Wakatoshi’s mouth, a lifetime’s worth of that all at once. If he mysteriously dies in 24 hours, nobody will have to wonder why: this is it. 

But Kiyoomi deals with it like a fucking pro because he is a rational, well-adjusted human being. The devil on his shoulder—Komori—snorts at that. 

He goes back to the kitchen and follows the steps to make the actual McDonald’s baked apple pie with their choice of crust and filling, slapping Wakatoshi’s hands away when he tries to make himself useful because Komori and him agreed on no outside help unless it’s for tasting. 

The final product is not as neatly shaped or nicely decorated, but when Kiyoomi bites into it he thinks it’s not bad at all. The crust is crunchy on the outside and softer on the inside and the filling isn’t too sweet. Not bad.

He walks over to where Wakatoshi is, his elbows on the counter, and holds the pie out.

“Try it.”

Wakatoshi leans in closer and bites at the top left corner of the pie, making the filling spill out of the top right corner and down his chin. Kiyoomi lifts his other, pie-less hand and lets it hover under Wakatoshi’s face. He doesn’t care about making a mess of Wakatoshi. He does, however, care about making more of a mess of his kitchen.

“Good,” Wakatoshi says once he’s swallowed. Kiyoomi nods at him, slides his thumb up over his chin to gather the sticky syrup and—he had every intention of pulling away and washing it off, but once he reaches the corner of Wakatoshi’s mouth, he parts his lips and leans further in, and then Kiyoomi’s thumb is enveloped in soft, wet heat.

He makes a noise, probably. He just can’t hear it because there’s blood rushing in his ears and every sensory experience he’s capable of narrows down to where Wakatoshi’s lips close around his finger. 

It can’t possibly last for over two seconds. Wakatoshi presses his tongue against the pad of Kiyoomi’s thumb and then pulls off, lips dragging up up up until the finger pops out of his mouth. Then he licks his lips. The sadist.

“I don’t think you should be allowed in public.” Kiyoomi stands there rooted to the spot, right hand clutching at the remaining half of his pie, left hand suspended in midair right where Wakatoshi released it.

“We are not in public.”

“I don’t think you should be allowed in private, then.”

With herculean effort Kiyoomi manages to unstick his feet from the ground and walk over to start rinsing the six hundred utensils he used before putting them in the dishwasher. 

Wakatoshi walks over and wraps his arms around Kiyoomi’s middle, breathes against his nape and then plants a kiss there.

“What does that mean?”

Kiyoomi is slightly sweaty and disgusting from being in the kitchen all day, and he’s burning up from the oven and the stove and the finger licking and Wakatoshi’s presence, but he doesn’t shove him away. He could be standing on a sunspot, one fraction of a second from burning to ashes, and in that fraction of a second he still wouldn’t push him away.

“What I said,” Kiyoomi tells him.

“This is my apartment,” Wakatoshi says against Kiyoomi’s skin.

“Exactly. So if you don’t want me to die you’ll stop that and help me clean it up.”

Wakatoshi kisses the side of his neck, the hinge of his jaw. Kiyoomi is the alchemist who hasn’t seen the light of day in three months, the alchemist in love.

“Okay.”

+++++

At first, Kiyoomi thinks he’s having a Pavlovian response to… something. 

He writes the word on the margin of the copies his professor hands out, and while he drones on and on about thermodynamics, the dipshit sitting next to Kiyoomi decides to do the opposite of minding his business, points at the word scribbled on the margin and says, “It’s bullshit.” 

Kiyoomi knows it’s not bullshit. He watched a 14 minute video of a man conditioning his cats to come for food when he made a noise that he copied off of Ocarina of Time, all using Pavlovian classical conditioning. 

That, however, makes him realize that whatever is happening to him isn’t a Pavlovian response, but just his sex drive. Because he’s having increasingly fucked up dreams about putting his fingers inside or somewhere near Wakatoshi’s mouth, and it’s an inconvenience. 

Last night, in Kiyoomi’s dreamverse, Wakatoshi was taping his fingers before a match, and he forgot to cut the tape beforehand. When he finished, he pulled Kiyoomi’s hand up to his face and, with Kiyoomi’s fingers pressed against his lips, tore the tape with his teeth.

Kiyoomi’s hypothesis is that his subconscious is investing so much energy in providing him with a scenario where he needs his fingers to be in Wakatoshi’s mouth that it’s foregoing all the important details. 

Like how Wakatoshi would never forget to cut the tape beforehand. Or how he would never use his teeth to tear it either. Or how they never ask each other for help taping their fingers because they each have their own particular ways in which they like their fingers taped, and they each prefer to do it alone.

To add to the whole thing, the lack of precision gives Kiyoomi a headache. He needs a bath and a nap and a face mask and Ushijima Wakatoshi’s mouth on him. For his peace of mind.

+++++

One full week of heartbreak over Iizuna Tsukasa’s graduation as a high schooler made Kiyoomi promise himself that he would never get attached to his teammates like that ever again, to keep it all on the court and professional. So he lives by that, doesn’t contact his team for anything else. Except at the start of his second year of college he catches a glimpse of a familiar face in the lab, a face he’s used to seeing under the bright lights of the university’s gym, dripping sweat.

This is how lab partner Fujita comes to be, replacing middle blocker Fujita in his mind. Kiyoomi agrees to be his lab partner because he needs a partner anyway, and it’s easier to just say yes to the only person he already knows in this class. Kiyoomi does the hands-on lab work and Fujita is good at data analysis, so task division works okay for them. Except for how they both kind of suck at typing out lab reports—Kiyoomi’s too brief and non-explanatory, Fujita’s unnecessarily long-winded—and that’s why they decide to share the burden of it. 

Which Kiyoomi conveniently forgets about, because he conveniently forgets about everything academia-related, about everything in general, really, when he’s got Ushijima Wakatoshi naked in between his legs. 

Wakatoshi has the morning off, and Kiyoomi has the opposite of the morning off because he has finals to study for. So Wakatoshi knocks on his dorm room’s door and lays him flat on the tiny bed and says relax before dropping to his knees and throwing Kiyoomi’s legs over his shoulders.

The state they’re in when they hear someone knock on the door is nowhere near as compromising. For starters, they’re both wearing pants. But they’re fucked out and orgasm-high, and also tangled together because it’s the only way to be when you’re both over 190 centimeters tall and the bed is kid sized.

“Sakusa, will you read this over?” Fujita’s small voice comes in from the outside. Kiyoomi groans. 

“I’m busy.”

“Yeah, well, we have an hour left to turn it in, so…”

Kiyoomi reluctantly untangles himself from Wakatoshi and starts looking for a shirt.

“You couldn’t have called?”

“I did call. Three times. And I texted too, saying I was on my way here.”

Kiyoomi eyes his phone where it rests ignored over his desk, do not disturb mode turned on.

“Fine. One moment.”

He turns to look at Wakatoshi and—yeah, this won’t do. Kiyoomi can spot at least four patches of skin he sucked bruises on from across the room. He picks up the Adlers sweatshirt that he tossed on his rolling chair when he peeled it off of Wakatoshi earlier and throws it in his direction.

It’s not gonna get better than this, he thinks as he walks to the door and pulls it open. Fujita starts speaking while he tries to find something in his bag.

“I brought you Pocky ‘cause I knew you weren’t gonna like th—woah.” Kiyoomi turns back to see what’s so impressive, realizes Wakatoshi’s sweatshirt is just now starting to fall down over his torso. Fuck it, maybe Kiyoomi will go on a murder spree. “Y’know, Sakusa, I can just turn in the report like this, no big deal. If we get a bad grade it’s on me, I’ll buy you dinner to make up for it.”

“No need,” Wakatoshi says, running his hand through his hair and messing it up further. “I am on my way out, I just need to find my—”

“Socks? They’re under the bed,” Fujita tells him. Kiyoomi snatches the box of Pocky from his hands and opens it. They’re strawberry cream flavored. “Next to the, uh—”

Kiyoomi looks up again as he tears the bag open. The way that sentence should’ve ended, he realizes after taking a look, is with next to the half empty bottle of lube. And see, the thing is, this is not embarrassing for them. Embarrassment is a foreign feeling for Wakatoshi, and the only person who can make Kiyoomi blush and sputter is also Wakatoshi. If there’s someone who should be feeling embarrassed it’s Fujita, and that’s exactly none of Kiyoomi’s business.

“Thank you,” Wakatoshi says, gets on his hands and knees to retrieve his socks.

Kiyoomi chews on a Pocky stick, walks over to the bed and offers one to Wakatoshi. 

“They’re your favorite.”

Wakatoshi leans back, socks in one hand, half empty bottle of lube in the other, and catches the other end of the stick between his teeth, and suddenly it’s the fucking lab all over again except this time he’s on his knees and holding a bottle of lube. Kiyoomi is the religiously, politically, and cosmically appointed person to deal with this specific situation, and he would absolutely deal with it if it weren’t for—ugh!—Fujita standing on the doorway.

Wakatoshi doesn’t even realize that there’s some type of galactic realignment happening in Kiyoomi’s brain, because he simply pulls away, Pocky stick between his teeth, and gets up to place the bottle of lube back in the drawer before putting his socks on. This is just the usual, really, Wakatoshi doing normal person things and Kiyoomi borderline popping a vein over it. 

Fujita, though—Fujita notices. While Wakatoshi gathers the rest of his stuff and eats his Pocky stick, which feels like two lifetimes but truly just takes him about ten seconds, Fujita pretends like he’s trying to dig something out of the depths of his bag. That’s what Kiyoomi thinks he’s doing, at least, except then he opens his mouth.

“Hey, um—this might be weird? Considering, you know,” he waves his hands in the general direction of the entire room, “this whole, you guys, and, yeah.” Kiyoomi can feel his own frown deepening with every word that comes out of Fujita’s mouth. “But I figured—I mean, if it doesn’t bother you—”

“Fujita, what.”

Fujita, because he wants Kiyoomi to really go on that murder spree, looks straight at Wakatoshi and says, “Would it bother you to sign something for me?”

Of course he wants an autograph. Duh. Wakatoshi is a professional volleyball player who’s been in the spotlight since high school. Kiyoomi has never frowned so hard in his entire goddamn life. This is the face that makes Komori laugh and say he’s going to look 55 by age 30. 

“Of course not,” Wakatoshi says, unaware of the multiple levels of fucked up that this whole situation is. He walks over and takes the pen and notebook Fujita holds out for him. “Is it Fujita with the flower kanji or with wealth?”

“The second one,” Fujita answers, drawing the shape in the air with his finger. Kiyoomi is seeing red, not that anyone in the room cares how he feels right now.

“Here,” Wakatoshi says, handing Fujita the pen and notebook back. 

“Wow. Thank you so much. Sorry to bother you.”

“Not at all. Good luck with your lab report.”

Wakatoshi nods at him, walks over to Kiyoomi to kiss the frown on his face and tell him, “I will talk to you later,” and then steps out of the room leaving chaos and disaster in his wake.

+++++

Kiyoomi never does assessments of his day because if he does, he ends up remembering minor things that bothered him and just invites them back into his head so they can bother him again.

He will say, though: it’s been a good day.

Finals are over, which means he’s experiencing that post-last day-of-class high that doesn’t make it even remotely possible for him to give a shit about what the results of said finals are going to be. 

The Schweiden Adlers played their first friendly match with Kageyama Tobio as a setter, a challenge to every other Division 1 team to go ahead and try to take the champions title from them.

Kiyoomi gets to spend the whole weekend at Wakatoshi’s place without worrying about anything. The whole weekend. He doesn’t have to leave on Sunday afternoon because he doesn’t have class at the crack of dawn every Monday anymore.

It’s been a good fucking day, he thinks again later when Wakatoshi comes home, and Kiyoomi gets to climb over him and kiss him breathless. 

There’s something about him post-match—that bone-deep exhaustion, aching limbs heavy and overexerted, and its accompanying victory—that turns Wakatoshi into a live wire, or a ticking bomb, or the edge at the top of a waterfall. Everything is an event, everything elicits a reaction, everything leaves him in exhales, like the simple fact of Kiyoomi slightly digging his fingers into the golden skin of his upper thigh, squeezing softly at his sore muscles, makes him breathe different.

Wakatoshi pulls away for a second, eyes the warmest shade of green, and says:

“I think we should send Fujita an apology letter.”

Kiyoomi feels like someone smashed a glass bottle on his head.

“What.”

“I said I think we—”

“I heard you. I just can’t think of a single reason why you’d want to do that.” 

There are no words in Kiyoomi’s vocabulary that can describe how baffled he is at the fact that they’re having this conversation while they’re naked and he’s straddling Wakatoshi’s lap. His first solution—which he knows is not gonna work because Ushijima Wakatoshi can be just as stubborn as him if he wants to be—is to try to take his mind off it. He leans down and starts leaving biting kisses on Wakatoshi’s neck.

“I think we made him uncomfortable,” Wakatoshi continues, breath hitching when Kiyoomi licks at the hollow of his throat. 

Just like Kiyoomi thought: it doesn’t work. He pulls away. Plan B is simply trying to get through this infuriating conversation as fast as possible.

“He got to see you shirtless and walked away with your autograph. That’s more than enough reparations.”

Wakatoshi frowns, like he’s really weighing the variables and trying to decide if it’s a fair trade. It’s not gonna work either, because it can’t work on somebody who is completely unaware of how devastatingly sexy he is.

“I see. I do believe that—”

Kiyoomi covers Wakatoshi’s mouth with his fingers and rolls his hips down because he is not known for his patience, and he does believe that desperate times call for desperate measures. He feels the noise Wakatoshi makes rather than hearing it.

“Say Fujita’s name one more time and I’m kicking you out of here.”

Kiyoomi makes a miscalculation. He fails to consider the fact that, with the exception of his own sex appeal, Wakatoshi is very much aware of the intricacy and magnitude of his own strengths. Which is why instead of saying this is my apartment like Kiyoomi thought he would, he starts nibbling on Kiyoomi’s fingers, parts his lips against them and kisses up toward the tips, open-mouthed. 

Kiyoomi is effectively frozen in place. It can’t keep happening like this, he needs his motor skills and Wakatoshi shuts the whole system down with one flick of his tongue.

“If you’re really about this you can just say so.” Kiyoomi doesn’t know how to be anything other than blunt, but this just comes out whiny, like he’s being forced into bargaining.

“If I’m really about what?”

“This whole… fingers in your mouth situation.”

Wakatoshi’s eyes clear, like he’s putting things together in his head.

“Ah. I hadn’t thought about it like that.”

There’s no way that’s true, and Kiyoomi tells him as much. 

“You made it that way in the lab when I was very professionally and non-erotically trying to gather a DNA sample.”

“I was helping with your homework.”

“And then when I was trying to bake pie.”

“The filling was good.”

“And that time in my room with the Pocky.”

“My hands were busy.”

Kiyoomi could’ve let this go thirty seconds ago. Now? Now there’s truth to be found and justice to be made. He grabs Wakatoshi’s face in his hand, fingers squeezing his cheeks a little. 

“You open your mouth and look at me like you need something.”

“Like I need you,” Wakatoshi says immediately, like it’s the simplest, most essential truth of the universe. He means it, too. He always means it. Kiyoomi gives himself five seconds to feel like a fucking god about it before rolling his eyes.

“So you admit it.”

Wakatoshi sits up from where he was leaning against the pillows and pulls Kiyoomi in as close as he can, arms crossed behind his back.

“I like having my mouth on you, yes.” He kisses Kiyoomi’s shoulder, the base of his neck, a live demonstration of his words. Kiyoomi curls his fingers in his hair on instinct. “But it’s not finger specific. It’s more that I like to watch.”

“Watch what?”

Wakatoshi traces the line of his jaw with his lips.

“You.”

“Huh?”

Wakatoshi pulls away and locks eyes with Kiyoomi, a challenge or a question or a confession, maybe all three at once. He wraps his fingers around Kiyoomi’s wrist, brings it up to his mouth to kiss his pulse point. He then places the tip of his tongue at the point where Kiyoomi’s index and middle finger meet and licks a thin stripe up his middle finger until he reaches the blunt edge of Kiyoomi’s fingernail. 

Kiyoomi feels like he was just split in half by red hot metal, like he’s releasing smoke and sparks and foam, like he’ll never be able to pull himself together. That’s it: the deconstruction of the short-lived Sakusa-Kiyoomi-having-the-upper-hand industrial complex.

Kiyoomi doesn’t realize when Wakatoshi lets his wrist go, but suddenly his hands are cupping Kiyoomi’s jaw with all the gentleness in the world, clouded eyes searching his face. Wakatoshi leans in and presses a kiss to his cheekbone, feather-light.

His voice is a blend of amusement and something else, desire, maybe, when he says, “You should see yourself.”

Kiyoomi should not see himself because he would die of something. He can only imagine what he looks like. Probably like he could swallow Wakatoshi whole, eyes dark, pink in the face, most certainly life-threateningly in love. He can’t imagine anything worse than seeing himself like this, actually.

The truth is, Ushijima Wakatoshi is the most unavoidable, overwhelming, irresistible human being he’s met in his entire life, and Kiyoomi has been pedaling down a tightrope with his arms stretched out, trying to balance out how much he wants Wakatoshi to be wrong and how much he wants to kiss that red mouth that slid up his fingers moments ago. 

He pushes Wakatoshi back against the pillows and positions himself between his legs, presses his thumb into his inner thigh and feels his sharp inhale, bites hard at the side of his neck. Wakatoshi’s lips collide against his, slow and searing, shoving competition aside in quiet exhales to make space for the two of them.  

Kiyoomi kisses Wakatoshi with a hand on his jaw, feeling bone move underneath his skin, his other hand pushing into sore muscles, squeezing up his thighs, pinching at his sides, pressing into the spot below his collarbone, digging into his shoulders. Wakatoshi unwinds with each exhale, sighing tension into Kiyoomi’s mouth until he’s this close to falling apart at the seams, mouth wet and hungry.

Seeing him like this makes Kiyoomi think about how the two of them don’t know how to exist in a place that’s not the middle, balanced between rivalry and something softer, more tender. Kiyoomi, an acrobat now, takes another step forward, precariously balanced, when he pulls his hand away from Wakatoshi’s jaw and suspends it directly in front of his open mouth. 

Something cuts through the air in between them, heady and knowing and silent, and then Wakatoshi is pressing his tongue against the flesh of Kiyoomi’s palm and up towards his fingers, wide and bold, before Kiyoomi reaches down to wrap his hand around him.

Time twists itself into a different shape after that. Wakatoshi comes with a groan turned whine that Kiyoomi swallows, thumb pressed to the corner of his mouth, then sliding over his bottom lip, kiss-slick and bitten red. Kiyoomi comes on Wakatoshi’s fingers, teeth carving dents into the skin high on his chest. 

“What is it?” Wakatoshi asks later when Kiyoomi snorts against his neck.

What it is is that Kiyoomi has thought of himself as the alchemist in pursuit of something sweet on the roof of Wakatoshi’s mouth, and of them as acrobats tiptoeing down the in-betweens, and he was just thinking about how Wakatoshi might also be the glassblower, smoothing out Kiyoomi’s sharp edges, softening him into vases, drinking cups, window glass, little birds.

And about how sex and intimacy with Ushijima Wakatoshi make him a little stupid and ridiculous because now in his head the two of them are the whole fucking circus, and maybe being loved back by the person you love does that to you. Makes you a little stupid and ridiculous. Makes you want to dress up and put the better, most presentable parts of yourself on display for everyone to see, and keep everything else, all the secrets, the rougher and the uglier, but also the most honest behind closed curtains, reserved for the one person who’s chosen to love that as well.

Kiyoomi doesn’t say any of that, because if he says it Wakatoshi will say it right back and Kiyoomi will experience vital organ failure. So he kisses him again, soft and quick this time, before resting his temple against Wakatoshi’s chest. He immediately feels fingers in his head.

“Hoshiumi says you and I are more married than Romero-san and his wife,” Wakatoshi starts as he buries his fingers in Kiyoomi’s curls. “She called him today before the match to apologize for throwing their kid's red socks into the washing machine with all of his white clothes.”

“That’s unfortunate.”

“Yes. But it made me think. And I realized that I would forgive you if you washed a red sock with all of my white clothes.”

He’s a better man than Kiyoomi for that.

“You wouldn’t need to,” Kiyoomi says. “I have an intricate, extensive laundry system. It would never happen to me.”

“I have one too.”

“Yeah?” Kiyoomi shifts, places his chin on his bent arms over Wakatoshi’s chest and raises an eyebrow at him. “Let’s hear it.”

+++++

“It was. The same. Damn. System,” Komori will say years in the future in front of a crowd of pink-faced, teary-eyed people, immediately after insulting Kiyoomi in about thirty different ways—he’s rude and egocentric and a pain in the ass and only cares about himself and has no tact. The list goes on.

“I don’t know what the system is, so don’t ask me. I also don’t know where they both picked it up from. All I know is that Wakatoshi didn’t propose until last year, but I knew the moment I heard that story that Kiyoomi was gonna marry him. Because he’d be a fool to let go of the one person who not only is willing to put up with the aforementioned list of horrible qualities, but also kind of makes him seem like a decent human being sometimes, and also has the same ridiculous, trillion step, never ending laundry system.”

The speech will go on. Kiyoomi will listen with his head on Wakatoshi’s shoulder as Komori embarrasses him further, and he won’t care. He must be allergic to the flower decorations, though, because something will lodge itself in his throat and won’t move, he’ll be fairly sure he’s not breathing, and his eyes will sting, and his jaw will lock because if he unclenches a single muscle he will fall apart altogether, a newlywed-shaped lump on the floor.

Wakatoshi will squeeze his hand then, the movement making his ring catch the light, and then pull it up to his lips, kiss his fingers. Kiyoomi will wonder how he’s supposed to stand up later, how he’s supposed to lift himself off the seat with all this weight in his chest. 

They really are the whole fucking circus. Kiyoomi will squeeze back and breathe again.