1.
He's exhausted and laid out in the grass. Bruised side but crooked smile on his lips as sweat drips down his forehead, the thrill of the chase still thrumming through him as he cracks open his eyes. Beautiful day, gorgeous sky, clouds that roll gently across the tidals of blue, and he turns his head to look at the person next to him. Ibara in all her glory. As tranquil as could be even with the rapidly expanding chest, grass stains down his clothes, remnants of concrete from throwing each other into structures they really shouldn't plucked across its cheek. Something twinkles, just skin deep but searing like a match to a wick, and he sits up enough just to lean over her form and pinch their nose between pointer and thumb.
He laughs at the reaction it gets him, indignant yet mellowed by something outside of his reach, a concept beyond him, and it bellows out of him like he wants the whole world to hear.
Letting go, he quickly rises to his feet and before bounding off as fast as he could, he yells out. "You're it!" And it means something entirely different as the firework trail of sparkles chase off his skin in the cool breeze.
2.
Frantic, fearful, throwing himself through wreck after wreck, searching, looking. He didn't care about the fight, he didn't care about the villain. He had seen her go down.
It's in the tizy of his hunt that he hears a weak groan. Spots the coiling vines. He rushes over to the area and witnesses a gut wrenching sight. It's hard to remember exactly what it was, but he knows it was bad enough that he had refused to leave its side even after the fight was said and done.
He kneels next to them, watching closely for signs of life.
"Rosebud?" It comes out shaky and unsure, trembling hand soothing across their forehead, uncaring of nicking himself on the pointed ends of their vines. He nearly sobs in relief when two inky eyes peel open, rubbing the back of his hand against his eyes to disperse any tears. The droplets pooling in the corners, spilling out every feeling of anguish and despair he had at the thought of losing him.
"Thank god you're ok." The twinkle blazes hot into an inferno beneath his skin so his fingers run warm as he presses comforting hands to beaten flesh. The concept manifesting in his veins, transfusing itself into his blood as it travels up and up and up til it hits his heart.
3.
How funny is it, that in a moment of silence, where nothing is happening, no threats to their life, nothing, that Hanta realizes it?
His eyes just so happen to catch a glance of the other, thorny and soft, sitting across from him on his bed putting together beads and thread. And he can't look away. There's a pang in his chest and it sparks the kerosene flooding through him, the naphtha that had infused itself with his very being all ablaze, his skin and bone and the beat of his heart caught in the flame.
And this is no affection he's felt before. He knows what silly crushes feel like, he knows how the warmth of being with his family entails, this is its own beast that nuzzles against him with all its power.
He's a buzzing of kindling. Charcoal eyes hot coals.
Tips of fingers ends of twigs that brush the breeze in the aftermath of a wildfire.
She is the wind that carries the rain that soothes the ash of him. Or maybe riptide and ocean and waves that press against warmed sands and meld over millions of years to sea glass and stones. Or the thread that ties the bead into meaning. Into art and passion, into wear and sentiment. Maybe they're all of that. Maybe more. Maybe none of it at all cause he doesn't ever envision his friend and see a concrete definition. Imagery that can contain all of his multitudes couldn't be caught in just mortal words. Not in vocabulary that could be spoken or scrawled, a language that's only caught in the inbetweens of smiles, at the precipice of a brush of hand, at the tail end of a joke that gains a blank faced statement in kind, the meeting place where concern strikes against joy. And he's resolute to the fate that he may never know the words, may never speak the nectar of his heart and soul, could never compact it into something as feeble and meaningless as human meaning.
The closet he could ever hope to whisper into the depths of the vastness of this and every universe that would listenโ
He sets the manga he was reading down and scooches in closer to them. Pinching their nose, and when that disgruntled expression rears, he laughs. Boisterous and wickedly sweet, throwing his head back as he releases the hold. But this time he doesn't run. He lays himself back on the sheets, laughter bubbling, and lets the pops of light, the firework rending off his skin, fill the room until it's blindingly clear.
