Chapter Text
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Saiki Kusuo has trouble sleeping without you now.
It’s a mundane detail, in the end. Sleep is ultimately just a part of the cycle of everyday. The details of sleep are often so minuscule in size that it’s difficult to notice when anything changes in it. You wake up, live life and sleep - to do it all over again everyday. It’s boring and simple.
Saiki likes boring and simple . He finds that incredibly soothing. Things that are straightforward and easy to understand, he finds himself wanting to pay attention too. Saiki wants to be normal more than anything in the world.
Maybe it’s part of the reason he’s so sensitive to changes that most people don’t notice. A light scratch can become a wound so much faster than you realize when you’re not paying attention to it - the repetition in that changing detail. A thousand scratches over time instead of a cut once. A little details over time instead of sudden change.
Even the most important days of your life start the same way. You wake up, and go back to sleep just to do it all over again. Yet you never notice the small changes in your sleep schedule like how much you're getting until it makes an appearance somewhere else in your life.
It’s a mundane detail. Noting ornate about the fact that Saiki Kusuou finds it hard to sleep without you now. Yet despite that, he is only narrowly escaping the dread of that fact.
Today will start like any other day. Saiki will wake up, gets dressed for class, and waits for you to meet him at the station so you can walk to school together. You will hold his hand when no one is around and wink like it’s a secret, then smile and laugh it off when he says nothing back. Then the day will pass, and Saiki will steal a million small glances at you until you notice (but you never do) and then class will end. Depending on the day, he goes to your house and lays next to you. Sometimes he kisses you just to mess with you.
Saiki Kusuo finds it hard to sleep without you. Sleep is nothing special. Life is nothing special, but as he lays in his bed with his hands stiff at his sides - he thinks about how much much harder everything mundane is without you.
He doesn’t get a lick of sleep, but he tries to make sure it doesn’t look that way. He gets up, and the day goes as expected. He does everything like he said he would earlier, from holding your hand and stealing glances. He walks with you to school, but this time he finds himself staring at you. He tries to do it in a way that's distant, so that his gaze falls on the corner of the room where it’s not so obvious.
For better or for worse, he just can’t stop thinking about you. He sits, and stares, and racks his brain with all the information that your relationship has taught him about himself. About the meaning of his own life and the greater scope. He thinks of how you taught him love, with gentle hands that feel so warm in his own.
A human being is normally 98 degree fahrenheit, which is hot. Saiki knows facts like that objectively, but no one ever teaches you about warmth. Maybe it’s a lesson one only learns in love, how one might feel when the warmth of another person feels. Saiki knows the heat of the sun, the heat of your skin, the heat of the water when it boils - but to know warmth like you is daunting.
Warmth is the thing that heat provides. The warmth of the sun on your skin after a cold day, early in the afternoon. The warmth in your face when you look at someone you admire. The warmth of ramen broth after pouring the hot water in, exhausted and starving after a long day. Saiki K has never considered those details before he met you. He has never wondered about the outcomes of the endless days and nights so much until he was by your side.
Feeling so much, Saiki Kusuo thinks, is a heavy burden. He wonders how you do it so freely, with a smile on your face like it is the easiest thing in the world. Those questions are the ones that bounce around in his head as he stares at you. He watches the way you draw in the margins of your notebook, hearts and stars next to all of your notes. He drowns himself in all of your details as he takes everything in.
Saiki doesn’t normally do this. Think so heavily about something, or let it affect him so much. But much like warmth is the result of heat, over-thinking must be the consequence of loving.
You unintentionally have changed his whole life. Little by little. By living in his mundane and boring world and just being by his side. If you discover that everything about him is so complicated, how's he supposed to believe you would stay. All of this, despite himself, has been so easy because he is supposed to be a normal and boring person.
Will you still love him, if you know he’s not?
In his face, his expression is hollow. His brows strung together a hair too tight, his jaw grinding his teeth. It’s hard to see his discomfort but he’s sure you would notice it’s.
“You okay?,” you ask.
It really is like clock-work. He almost wants to laugh, but he doesn’t. He shakes his head.
“I’m okay,”
You give him a pointed look, but he nods his head again to assure you. He can sense you haven’t let it go but you drop it for the time being. He should’ve figured you’d notice as much.
He stares at the clock. The day is nowhere near closing. It feels abhorrently long so he shuts his eyes so he doesn’t have to see it. He tries to remember what it feels like to be truly alone.
Saiki Kusuo has always hated winter. He doesn’t know what he was really expecting.
--
Time passes again, and Saiki finds himself in the same place he normally is on Fridays. Lying next to you on your bed, as you do your homework. Really he’s letting you copy his own, but he pretends not to notice as your eyes wander to his open book. He’s watching TV, a reality show playing distantly.
He’d also been trying to tell you for the last hour he’d been here. There’s no good way to say and express that you’re a psychic with powers to anyone really - but maybe there’s something better than just saying and showing it to you. The mind-numbing television is certainly helping, but you pouting next to him makes his brain fill up with fog. He can see you from the corner of his eyes, laid on your stomach, squishing your lips together and balancing a pencil out of boredom. He smiles, softly.
Expressing that feeling has become a lot less foreign. You always tell him he looks a lot less awkward than he did before so he does it openly. Immediately, he finds himself sighing internally. You really are everywhere in his mind.
“Hey,” you turn to your said, resting your cheek on your palm and laying on your side to face him. He looks at you surprised, and you pout. You reach out, poking the tip of his nose.
“What’re you thinking so much about?,” you mumble softly. Your hand reaches up, brushing hair out of his face. The touch is so intimate it almost hurts. He opens his mouth. If he was going to tell you, it’d probably be best to really say it. All things considered, it feels the most respectable.
He finds himself slinking back. Concern immediately washes over you and there’s nothing Saiki can do or say to relieve it - and that fact alone makes him regret his choice.
He knows that there’s no other real choice in the end. He can’t just play pretend with you when you would have no trouble finding someone who would suit you much better than he could. He can’t keep trying to love and ignore this heavy burden. He really, really can’t.
You sit up, across from him on your full size mattress. He doesn’t want this. He really, really, really doesn’t want to tell you.
But he has too.
“Before I tell you, could I ask you something?,”
You nod immediately. Solemnly.
His heart feels like it’s cracking as he forces himself to put a cap on his feelings.
“Don’t ask any questions until the end,” he says, throat hoarse after using it for the first time without. You nod again, easily.
“There really is no easy way to say this is there,” he mumbles. He reaches over, and takes your hand, toying with your fingers. Your heart feels heavy seeing him in such disarray but you respect his wishes.
“I’m a psychic. And I can show you what I mean,” he says softly.
He can’t bear to meet your gaze, but he can sense your confusion. He finds it assuring at least, that you’re not moving your hands away from him. Still, he can’t help but feel like he can’t breathe. He can’t help but want to hide away in your gaze and stay there as if nothing was different. As if things really are normal.
Wordlessly, he nods his head to the direction of your table.
“Look over here,” he instructs. You do, not questioning him. Your heartbeat pounds.
And so, Saiki does something small. Slowly, he starts making things float off of your desk. He watches your expression carefully as he does. Your eyes widening the size of the moon, a hand cupped over your mouth in shock. He wants to tell you he’s sorry, though he doesn’t know what exactly. Whether it’s how he had to go and make this all complicated or whether or sorry for letting it all go on for so long.
In all the commotion, he doesn’t notice how tightly you still hold on his hand. He silently puts everything away. He watches as you turn to face him again, shock still clear on your expression. It fills him with dread.
Not able to look at you, he looks at his bag in the corner of the room. Somehow, it’s much worse than he thought it would be. He craves your reassurance but he can’t have it. He hates that feeling.
“I can do a lot of other things. Read minds, time travel, other related things. A lot of things that would take too long to tell you all at once. I guess a comic book hero is probably what it’s closest too,” he sighs.
For the first time, he meets your expression. It’s shoc, mostly and rightfully. Mixed in there is hurt. Hurt, that Saiki can only assume is from him. Hurt that Saiki can only assume he caused it because of his dishonesty. He tears himself away from your prying eyes, and takes a deep breath. Closing his feelings off.
“I can’t… I couldn’t let it get so far without telling you. I didn’t want to be dishonest with you when you’ve only ever been sincere with me. Other than me, my parents, grandparents, and brother know,” he explains.
“No one else does, other than you - so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell them. I don’t think there’s really anything else left for me to say, so I won’t,” he shifts, rubbing his hands with his face and taking a deep breath.
“Can I say something now?,” you ask, voice soft. He closes his eyes, leaning back against your bed and nodding.
“Thanks for telling me. Knowing you, it must’ve been hard to tell me something so important, so most of all - thank you for telling me,”
He’s surprised by your answer, but knows he shouldn’t be. Even in a situation like this one, you’d find a way to be so kind to him. He shakes his head, unable to say anything. With his eyes still closed as he just tries to hold everything in.
“I don’t really wanna break up,” you mumble. Saiki finds himself a little relieved but doesn’t let himself go any further. He holds onto his heartbreak, the gutted and empty feeling he has with an iron grip. He feels drained. Exhausted. He has to get used to it again.
“I just need some time I think.. to figure this all out and tell you how I feel. Just some time,”
He wishes he would get a vision for the future. To ease this lulling sense of panick within him. The dichotomy of wanting to say by yours side so badly, and the voice in his head that tells him he can’t have stirred up horribly heavy feelings inside of him. He isn’t sure what outcome is better - for everything to go wrong or for everything to go right. How does a person handle news like that? His brother was right, in the end. No one could ever love him knowing the reality of his life.
Saiki should know that he has to carry that burden forever. He should’ve held it closer to him.
Saiki feels so goddamn empty. Numb as he gets caught in the tricky spiderwebs of his emotions. He cuts it all out, sheering them down until they’re nothing but frayed ends and leaving it behind.
How can Saiki forgive himself for all the things he is not? How could you?
He’s sure in a week's time you will come to the same conclusion. He feels so certain about this detail, that he almost wants to smile again.
He has so much to say, but nothing comes out. So he opts for the easiest choice. He opens his eyes, and looks at you with no light in his pupils and nods. Wordlessly, he gets up and packs his things as you watch. You don’t have the courage to follow him out and he leaves you with only a sentence.
“I should probably head home,”
__
Saiki Kusuo often forgets he is burdened with the weight of the world.
It’s not that he doesn’t feel it. It’s hard not to carry it around as you navigate being alive - the notion that one wrong move on your end could impact so many other peoples. He knows so much more than any one person should know. He’s seen so much more than any one person should see. He has to save the world from ending. He has to make sure that everyone is okay, and he didn’t really ask for any of it.
He was barely a kid when he was hit with this information. As young as five, he saw just what kind of mess his powers could make if they were ever given the chance to do as much. He had too, for everyone's sake, turn everything off and grow numb to this burden. It doesn’t mean it isn’t there. It’s instinctual to him to feel heavy. A learned behavior through harsh lessons, and even worse punishment for failure. It used to trouble him more.
It doesn’t as much as it did prior. Saiki considers that an achievement at least.
Still though, you might be able to imagine what it’s like to meet someone who is able to carry all that burden without having to ask. Relief is a tentative word - to feel or be relieved of something is almost always circumstantial. He feels relieved when the coffee jelly doesn’t run out in the store. Or when he comes home to silence, undisturbed. Relief is a feeling he knows better not to familiarize something with.
Saiki is really unfamiliar with a lot of things. Pain, solace, burden, failure, the fear of not being enough. He had been numb of everything, and right now, it almost feels like some kind of luxury. He knows it’s balanced this way. If he were to forget everything, he would also forget warmth. Saiki would forget love, and joy and excitement if he turned his back on everything now.
If he really were to forget everything, he would forget you. He isn’t ready to let go of your hand yet. He isn’t ready to forget the curve of your smile, or the slope of your nose-bridge, or the small of your back. He isn’t ready to let go of your eyes, the way they will with light and tell him each secret stored underneath your lashes as you blink as they cast shadows on the wall. The weight of your body as you settle easily into his side. The feeling your nails scratching his scalp as he lets you hold him close to you. He doesn’t want to forge the rhythm of your heartbeat yet, he taps it to himself when he gets distracted.
He wants to hold onto you, for just a little bit longer. To the relief you have given him so readily, for a little bit longer.
His fingers are steadily sliding away from the relief of your touch, so he carries the burden of knowing he wasn’t enough in order to hold on to you a little longer.
Love is a menace at times. And Saiki Kusuo loves you so much, he doesn’t want to do anything else.
For a week, he is completely empty. He still does everything normally - as normal as they can be. Each action feels unfamiliar to him. He gets to school, sits next to you not bothering to say hello, doesn’t look your way and goes home. It feels like time never really ends. It’s not that everything is meaningless, really.
It just feels bitter to try and exist again like that. He blames himself because it was him who let you in. It was him who allowed himself to think that maybe he can really experience something as interesting as love without repercussions. He’s known his whole life. He should’ve known better.
For five days, he endures your presence and then the weekend grants him relief. Caught in the middle of completely numb and feeling everything - stuck stagnantly in the same place. It’s a Sunday afternoon, and he is simply laying in bed staring at the ceiling.
The doorbell ringing startles him from his position. He wants to send one of his clones to answer but decides against it. He stands up, rubs his face with his hands and goes to the door.
When he opens it, it’s the person he expects to see least. You’re standing in your casual clothes, with a box and a bag and in tow. For a moment, he just stares.
“Hey,” you say, giving him a crooked smile “Can I come in?,”
A familiar feeling falls over him, and he steps out of the way to let you inside. He watches you in simple awe as you take your shoes off and put slippers on. He forgets to close the door as it happens but he remembers half-way through.
For a moment, he’s able to forget everything. He isn’t sure how to take that in.
“Can we talk?,”
He nods curtly.
“Yeah,”
He leads you to his bedroom. He doesn’t know when his parents will be back but it feels strange to talk in there. When you get to his room, he lets you sit on the bed while he sits in the desk chair. It’s quiet for a while. Neither of you really have much to say to start with, though he knows you probably have a lot more than he does. He wonders how easily you’ll let him down. Bracing himself, he bites the bullet and looks at you. He gives you a half-hearted, barely there smile. He still wants to reassure you he’s okay even when he isn’t. Even when he feels like he won’t ever be.
“What’d you wanna talk about?,
You jump back a little, but find yourself smiling. You’re nervous. You place your bag on the floor, with the box still on the bed and place your hands steadily in your lap. Without tearing your eyes away, you speak.
“You know how you asked me to not any questions till the end last time?,”
He nods. It stings.
“Could you do the same for me?,”
He nods again, watching as you take a deep breath.
“I love you,” you say breathlessly, trying to keep yourself from coming. It’s the thing you’ve wanted to tell him most since that day a week ago, to remind him. He seems so surprised and you’re not sure how to take that.
“I really love you. So much sometimes it makes me sick,” you just barely whisper “So I thought a lot about what I wanted to tell you. How I should go about this and what I wanted - for you and for me,”
You pick your legs up from the floor and sit criss-cross, nervously playing with the frayed strings on your clothes. You feel so anxious telling him all this, you might make yourself ill at this rate. It shouldn’t be so hard, but it is anyways. Maybe it’s because of just how much it matters.
“When you left, I called your mom,” you admit shyly. His eyes widen, but he chooses to respect your wishes with the expectation you’ll explain.
“I had a lot of questions I needed to know the answers too, so I could figure everything out. So I called her and asked about it. What they were, how they changed you. what it was like - she told me little stories from when you were a kid,”
You pause, taking another deep breath.
“It was hard for you wasn’t it? She told me as much as she knew, but if I know you at all - there’s probably a lot there, right?,” you ask. It’s rhetorical, but he nods instinctively.
“It’s a lot to take in, in the grand scheme of things. I’m not the most spiritual person or whatever else, but it’s a lot of stuff to consider. I’m not sure I’ll ever recover from the pure shock,”
You laugh light-heartedly, in a way that makes Saiki believe everything will be okay. His breathing slowly grows uneven as he continues to listen, going in a direction he couldn’t predict.
“And if I know you at all, or even half as much as I think I do, you probably handle this all alone too, don’t you?,”
Another rhetorical question, but one he doesn’t feel like answering. He shifts stiffly in his seat, eyes anywhere but you. He hears you laugh again.
“Your mom told me that you don’t really have control over your powers either, than you have something to keep them in check because if your emotions get out of control - they will too,”
“It explains a lot in a way,” you say softly, deep in thought “About your brother, and about you and how you are. Why you’re so closed off to everything, even the people and things you care about,”
“Unrelated, but your brother sounds like a massive prick, by the way. You deserve to be the favorite,” you say with your lips pressed into a flat line. He smiles at that.
“I know you won’t believe me if I tell you it doesn’t make me love you any less. And I know if i tell you, I still wanna be with you - you’ll bottle those feelings of doubt up because you have too and because it’s who you are,”
He looks at you with true shock when you say that. It makes you smile warmly, affectionately - with such strength and resolve. Saiki is crumbling away like a sandcastle, the waves within him crashing against the walls he’s worked so hard to build.
And you are like a child at play, with determination and blind resolve to build him back up again as many times as you deem necessary. Stubby hands that reach for him and make him whole all over.
“So, I won’t tell you either of those things. They’re true, but that’s not why I came to see you,”
He shifts uncomfortably, laying in wait.
“You love me so much, that you see right past all of my insecurities. So much that it feels like I don’t have them. When I worry about being enough for you or when I worry about my reclusive nature. Sometimes I’m too headstrong or too emotional. Overall - I think I’m too much to deal with,”
He wants to protest, but clamps his mouth shut.
“But that’s not how you treat me. I got used to being treated like a convenience, and not a choice and it felt foreign when you chose me. That you still choose me. Even my parents, in the end, don’t choose me. You did,”
You find yourself wiping straight tears, your voice growing warbly. You push through, to make the point you’ve been so desperately trying to make.
“You could really have anything you wanted, and you chose me. I think about it all the time - or if a day will come that you won’t wanna choose me anymore and if I’ll really have to let you go,”
You laugh, taking a deep breath as hot tears continue to flood your face. Saiki just watches, unable to move. He hates seeing you cry.
“All that is just to give you perspective - I know you never feel like there’s two sides to this but there is. You’re brave for me and I’m brave for you. That’s how we work, I think,”
“But I don’t want you to have to be brave anymore,” you say shaking your head.
There it is. The words you so desperately have tried to say. The things you’ve tried so hard to express, laid out in the open.
“We’re both the same in that way. That we had to take care of ourselves because no one was ever around too - though yours is a lot more impressive to me,”
“Nobody ever taught you how to manage all that burden, but they still expect you to have it all figured out. Most kids, when they deal with their feelings, learn how to control them before they get out of control but you never did and that’s unfair,”
You straighten your back. Giving him a deep sigh - you straighten your clothes out. You lift your eyes, red and puffy from tears but smiling. Full of light, and happiness, and desperation all mixed together in a beautiful disaster.
“You deserve to be happy and normal, Saiki Kusuo. And I want to be apart of that happy and normal so I hope you’ll keep letting me,”
As Saiki Kusuo sits in his desk chair, across from you - he finds himself clasping his hands. The feelings inside him are so heavy, they make his fingers curl around each other to maintain order. Magenta eyes fall over your weary expression - riddled with exhaustion. There are purple rings underneath your own eyes, your lashes sitting against your cheeks as if they are weighted.
The universe is a grand and unfathomably large place. Whether it be by force or by circumstance, no one human being can understand the sheer size and expansion of planets and stars and the vast emptiness that is the skies. He understands that well, how impossibly small things are in comparison to everything else. He has seen every beautiful sight, or exciting place, or galaxy that this universe has to offer.
In a life that had always offered him so little in return for all it’s maintenance. In a life that he has seen each crevice and corner of the world with the gentle snap of a finger.
Yes, in a life where he believed that there would never be anything to truly change or make him happy - there is you.
You, and your gentle hands and kind, tired eyes. You and your loving heart. You and your simplicity, your understanding, your perfect imperfections. You, and the bags under your eyes, and the rays in your clothes.
You, you you.
In the grand scheme of everything, in a world where most things that mean something to other, mean absolutely nothing to him, there is you.
You in your ordinary, intentional, detailed, and well thought-out love.
When Saiki Kusuo comes to loving you, he had done it without intention. He’s sure that part was a two-way street.
Yet to love someone with intention, means to love with your best foot forward. To think, act, and feel in line with what loving them might mean. To love someone intentionally blooms a love so well-crafted, it will not break. Love that is intentional is bloom love in atoms, indestructible by nature
When you love someone intentionally, it means to love with no end in mind. Loving intentionally, is to love simple. and to love wholly. It is how Saiki Kusou finds himself wanting to love you. With all the parts of him, in an intentional and obvious way.
He finds himself using his voice again, when he speaks. It hasn’t been quiet for long, his mind is simply running a million miles an hour. But, when he looks at you he feels relief and relishes in it.
You are the only person who has ever told him exactly what he wants to hear, and he still manages to believe you for everything it's worth.
“Thank you,”
He doesn’t need to say anything else. He’s reassured by your happiness in his words. Silently, you raise a brow, and open your arms. And Saiki Kusuo laughs, a small chuckle that mirrors you in all it is.
He watches you as you pluck yourself from your spot, and plop yourself in his lap. He looks at you, into your eyes as you cradle his face in your hands. Your thumb brushes against his cheekbones, smoothing down till they rest at the base of his neck. He has a place he likes to have his hands known, right on your waist. It’s him, who buries his face in your neck as you hold him close to you and let him be.
You are the garden that Saiki Kusuo has decided to plant his roots in. It is intentional. Even when the sunlight dips in it’s brightness, he knows there’s nothing in his way from finding shelter. Even when he is wilting and frail, you will give hima place to call home.
“I love you,” you whisper.
There is still so much to figure out. But that’s okay.
“I love you too,” he mirrors with intention.
Closing his eyes, he thanks the universe for putting him in this timeline just to meet you before letting you hold him for a long while.