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The bunks at The Eighth were just about as comfortable as any of the bunks Shinra has slept in. Never quite reaching that impossible solace of his childhood bed — with Shō’s soft wheezes and his mother’s faint snores from the other room. But they were serviceable, as most beds were.
Shinra finds that oftentimes he’s so busy he doesn’t really have time to toss and turn and scrutinise the softness of his mattress or the warmth of his sheets. Most of the time, when Shinra’s head hits the pillow, his conscious hits the glass roof of reality and he floats away to simpler times, or darker times or whatever that place between life and death and wakefulness was.
Most of the time.
Sharing a room was also nothing new to Shinra. It came with the territory of bunks and dorms and communal living that wasn’t quite home and wasn’t quite communal, but then again nothing ever really was. Sharing a room with Arthur wasn’t even that new either. Many a time they’d been shuffled into the same dorm, the academy grouping it’s orphaned wards together, separate and out of the way.
But this is different from the academy. Different from a room with six, seven, when Hajima was bad, and so often it was, eight to ten other boys. This, was sharing a room with just Arthur. And this, wasn’t just a dorm and it wasn’t just a bunk and though Shinra never stopped to think about it, never let himself stop to think about it, The Eighth was probably the closest to home he was ever going to get.
All this aside, tonight, that rare not-most-of-the-time, Shinra finds himself awake in his bed. Feet, perpetually too hot, sticking out of the blanket that otherwise smothered him up to his neck, staring blankly at the ancient analogue clock far too up the wall to be reasonable.
Below him there’s another creak as Arthur shifts restlessly in his bed. The seconds tick by, heralding an even greater late night, and still Shinra watches the minute hand march on, and still Arthur fights his sheets.
It’s nearing two am, a time of night that Shinra has never willingly observed on the clock, when he finally feels the tension in the room snap and force him to action. He leans over the bunk railing, searching for those stupidly bright blue eyes and that mess of golden hair.
“Arthur,” he calls, softly because despite his frustration, it’s early morning at The Eighth and everyone else was firmly, luckily, asleep. “Arthur,” he says again when he gets no response.
Shinra feels his patience wane as the blood rushes to his head and is just about to lean over fully and punch the vaguely human lump, that has only now gone suspiciously still, when Arthur emerges.
“Arthur,”
“Devil.”
“What are you doing?” Shinra asks frustrated. Arthur doesn’t look at him, his eyes, normally luminescent seem dull. Empty.
“Sleeping.” Arthur says with a sigh. It’s a weird sound, not like his usual sighs: the ones he makes when he thinks Shinra’s side of their argument is moronic; or the ones when their paperwork deadline gets moved up, and he’s running behind, so he knows he going to get scolded for not handing it in on time.
Shinra doesn’t know when he started being able to hear the difference. When even Arthur’s sighs became familiar.
“That’s not sleeping.” Shinra says, for lack of anything else to say. The more he looks at Arthur, the more his chest tightens. It’s not pity, Shinra doesn’t know what pity feels like, but the feeling leaves him kind of breathless nonetheless.
The way he’s leaning over the bed frame certainly does not help.
He could flip back up. Leave Arthur to his not-sleeping sleeping and try to get some shut eye himself. Instead, Shinra finds himself tumbling completely over the railing and falling a little less gracefully than he had intended into Arthur’s bed.
It’s a testament, perhaps, to how shitty Arthur must feel that he does nothing but barely brace himself for Shinra’s weight upon him.
There’s a silent moment, where Shinra tries to gather his bearings, loosen the knot in his chest while sprawled across the other boy and where Arthur does nothing but minute adjustments of his body so that he can breathe.
This close, pressed up against each other Shinra can confirm two things: firstly, Arthur wasn’t running a fever, Shinra’s first theory to why he was struggling to sleep a resounding failure; secondly, Arthur looked just as exhausted up close — it hadn’t been some trick of the shadows and moonlight.
It wasn’t just his eyes that had dulled, his hair somehow seemed more limp, his skin more pallid and the usual default straightness of his mouth was downturned.
“What’s the matter with you?” Shinra says, cursing his own tone a little but blustering through his slight worry with all the delicacy of a raging bull in a china shop, or a distracted Maki in the kitchen.
“Nothing,” Arthur answers quickly, “I’m just tired.”
“Right.” Shinra says flatly, drawing himself mostly subconsciously into a more comfortable position further into the others space, “Just tired. Why don’t you try sleeping then?”
“I was… Sleeping. I was sleeping.”
“That wasn’t sleeping,”
“How would you know? Maybe this is all just a dream I’m having.” Arthur says softly, drawing away only slightly, “Yeah, a dream,” he says, voice growing quieter and quieter, so quiet that by the end — “That’s the only way I’d get you into my bed.” Shinra can’t even hear it.
“It’s not a dream,” Shinra says, “It’s past two am and you keep tossing and turning, evidently not asleep.”
The downward curve of Arthur’s lips deepens and Shinra’s chest grows tighter at the sight of it. What had he been thinking, crawling down here? This conversation wasn’t helping at all and now they were both more awake than when they’d started.
Shinra tries to think about how sleep found him before. When he used to have his own bed, instead of his own bunk. Tries to think about a time when perhaps sleep would have been the last thing on his mind. What did his mother do, when he was restless in the evenings?
He thinks maybe she had sung to him, but too little of her words, of her voice, remains in his memories for him to try that. He doesn’t trust that anything else he tries to do in her image won’t be tainted like her smile is on his face.
So what else? Arthur was far too big to be rocked to sleep, as he’d seen her do Shō. There was no spinning mobile or glow-in-the-dark stars and moons above them to peer at. Shinra didn’t know any stories to tell, had spent most of his literature classes mind a million miles away and nowhere at all.
What kind of hero was he, that he’d be thwarted by a task as simple as helping his rival sleep?
“Devil,” Arthur says, pulling Shinra from the fumbling introspection of his own mind. There are dark smudges under Arthur’s eyes. Like bruises or thunderclouds or something else that’s violent and pretty and dark. Regardless his gaze on Shinra is just as resolute, just as heavy as usual. “What are you thinking about?” he asks.
“Nothing,” Shinra says quickly. A lie by omission, there was nothing helpful about his thoughts anyway. Arthur hums and closes his eyes, settles more firmly against his pillow. Shinra counts his eyelashes as they fan across the smooth planes of his cheeks.
More pressing midnight silence, where Shinra’s mind continues to prove itself useless and the controlled movement of Arthur’s chest against his own reminds him constantly of his failure to remedy the situation.
Maybe he should give up. Climb back into his own bed, bundle himself up to his neck and watch the clock tick into the morning. Maybe if they were both lucky and lay still enough they’d get the illusion that they’d slept when Lieutenant Hinawa broke down their door for morning call.
Shinra shifts to get up and enact his plan, the sting of failure lodging itself right next to the knot in his chest. He doesn’t get very far before a hand shoots out to grab him.
“Where are you going?” Arthur asks, eyes still closed, but grip stupidly firm. Any harder and Shinra would bruise.
There are callouses on Arthur’s palms in the places Shinra’s never had.
“To my bunk,” Shinra says, and Arthur make a noise of acknowledgement but his eyes don’t open and his hold doesn’t give under Shinra’s soft tug.
“Let go then,” Shinra says softly, softer than anything else he’s said all night. He wonders why he took this long to find the right tone. Would the outcome have been different if he has spoken like this from the start?
“No,” Arthur says, almost petulant but just as faint. Shinra doesn’t have a response for this so he just hovers with his wrist in Arthur’s hand and a foot on the ground. “Stay,” Arthur says finally, tugging him forwards. Shinra’s off balance anyway so it’s not difficult for him to fall forwards — right back to where he had started.
This time, instead of just bracing himself, Arthur shifts, making space in the bed for Shinra to lay without crushing him, but still mostly draped across him. The hold on his wrist slides until Arthur’s fingers interdigitate with Shinra’s, who in his shock has gone pliant through all the manhandling.
They’re sharing Arthur’s pillow, the messy strands of Arthurs hair tickling Shinra’s chin — they are so close that if Shinra were to tilt his head downwards, or to tilt Arthur’s up, he could brush his lips against Arthur’s.
“What are you doing?” Shinra whispers, even though his heart is beating so haphazardly in his chest, he can barely focus on anything else.
Arthur cracks open one eye, shifting his head so he can catch Shinra with his stupid, intense gaze. He sighs, a familiar one, the one where he thinks that Shinra is the idiot between them. “‘M tryna sleep.”
At the point where their hands are joined Shinra feels the hard skin of Arthur’s callouses against his palm. His thumb, possessed by a spirit Shinra thinks must only exist in the late night, strokes gently against that back of Arthur’s hand.
“I thought you were dreaming?” Shinra asks for lack of anything better to say. The blank line of Arthur’s mouth isn’t blank anymore, the corners flicked up, the line relaxed.
Arthur pulls him closer. Impossibly closer. When had he even gotten an arm over Shinra’s waist, when had he tucked the blanket over them? His ridiculously cold toes pressed against the too warm soles of Shinra’s feet.
“This is better than dreaming,” He says contentedly slumping further into the mattress. Shinra feels himself unwind in tandem.
Huh, Shinra thinks as their breathing syncs, had the bunks at the eighth always been this comfortable? He doesn’t get the chance to finish the thought, before he knows it they’re fast asleep.
OMAKE:
Hinawa knows that the recruits mess with the chore rota. Ōbi, bless him, doesn’t. Hinawa knows because he hasn’t seen any of the girls in the kitchen in weeks. Has actually never once seen Arthur fold a single piece of laundry. Whenever there was more than three dishes in the sink, surely there was also Shinra in the kitchen pulling on the frankly ridiculously pink gloves to start scrubbing away at them. Somehow, every can for the recycling was a little bit melted when he saw them and Iris always had dirt under her finger nails in the afternoons. At some point, Tamaki had permanently moved the duster to a lower shelf.
So, it’s quite a surprise for him to walk into the kitchen and see Maki doing prep work instead of Shinra diligently at work, while Arthur sat, half-asleep, at the kitchen table.
“Maki,” he greets her. She jumps a little almost dropping her knife. Maybe they needed more spatial awareness training if she hadn’t even heard him enter the room.
“Why are you here?”
“Ah,” she says putting the knife flat on the board. “Well you see,” she says gesturing with freshly freed hands. There’s a slight flush to her cheeks that he isn’t sure is embarrassment at being caught unaware or, more concerning, that she was hiding something.
“Where’s everyone else?” he asks instead, it was pretty rare to see any one of the recruits in a communal space alone — chores or not.
“Tamaki is taking a shower and Sister has her morning prayers, I’m not sure about Vulcan or Licht. Shinra and Arthur are…. Shinra and Arthur are….” she trails off here looking back towards her cutting board.
He waits a moment to see if she’ll finish her sentence and when she doesn’t he prompts. “Shinra and Arthur are?”
“Sleeping.” She says very quietly. Her blush back full force. Hinawa sighs, turning on his heel to head back in the direction of the dorms.
“Ah, Captain, w-wait!” She says suddenly. He pauses but sill she seems unable to continue, so he does instead.
He makes it to their door in the silence that The Eighth only seems carry in the relatively early morning. There seems to be no movement within the dorm, or perhaps knowing they’ve slacked off whatever new chores they’d assigned themselves behind his back they were hiding.
He knocks once, twice, three times, to no answer; pauses for a second before opening the door.
Hinawa isn’t a hundred percent sure what he expected when he opened the door. Some scrambling maybe, two nervous kids standing at parade rest perhaps.
They’re asleep. The boys, are asleep. Squeezed impossibly close together on Arthur’s too small bunk and completely oblivious to the wider world. He supposes this is what had Maki all blushing and stuttering, forcing herself into the dreaded kitchen.
They look peaceful. Unfortunately for them it’s half an hour past wake up call and peace was never an option.