archived!

You wait for him on the balcony whilst Aki grabs his cigarettes and as he comes back into the living room he pauses for a moment at the sight of you nestled comfortably amongst the stars. 

Framed by the curtains that flutter in the gentle early morning breeze, you are picturesque right now in the most tragic of ways. The downturn of your lips and the somber stare that you give to the block of apartments to the left hurts to observe, right down to his very core, but Aki can’t deny that you are beautiful in this lighting. 

“Here,” you call, tossing a lighter across to him. He catches it with one hand as he joins your side, leaning with his back to the railing just like you are. “I thought you could use a new one, yesterday you were saying that yours was running low.”

“You’re thoughtful,” he quips, holding a fresh flame to the cigarette between his teeth. “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Pulsating silence passes as Aki inhales deep, feels the familiar billowing rush of smoke upon his lungs, and blows it back out. You watch him as he does, inquisition in your narrowed eyes, like a million thoughts are bustling around beneath the surface of your mind. 

Then, suddenly, you pluck the cigarette from between his fingers and take a long, exaggerated drag. 

“So, that would be several minutes shaved from my lifespan, right?”

“Don’t do that,” Aki protests, reaching across to steal it back from you.

“And why not?” You fold your arms across your chest, leaning back against the railing so that Aki has to lean over you if he stands any chance of retrieving the cigarette dangling loosely between your lips. “It’s what you do, isn’t it? That’s the whole reason you still smoke- you’re dying anyway, so fuck it, why not make it worse?”

“It’s not like that,” he lies. 

“Of course not.” 

His left hand flies to your waist to keep you steady, knee pressed between your thighs as he uses the right to try and reclaim the small white stick. Your head curves back further still, arcing your stomach up against his and pressing your bodies so close together that you might just stand the risk of amalgamating together. 

Wind whips around your heads as you practically dangle out over the balcony of the highrise apartment building and Aki’s bangs obscure his eyes in all of the chaos of the moment. Below, cars race past and he can hear their engines speed close and shoot away again. Closer, your ribcage expands against his own chest as your lungs heave oxygen into your system. 

Aki’s fingers hover above your jaw, where the quickly burning ash of the cigarette tip threatens to drop and sear your chin. You look up at him with owlish blinking eyes, shocked into silence by the lengths he has gone to just to get you to give such a silly little thing back. 

“Fine,” you whisper, spitting it out to one side. It tumbles from your lips and descends into the sinking void of the urban jungle beneath, spinning and twirling like a freefalling dancer in slow motion. Aki watches it disappear before his gaze trails back across to your thin-drawn lips, to the eyes boring small holes into his skull. “Are you happy now?”

“It was a waste to throw it like that,” he says quietly, before adding, “thank you.”

“You’re insufferable,” you retort, palms pressing against his shoulders to urge him to move away. 

And yet his hand still lingers near your face, backs of his fingers tracing idly along your cheek. The other loosens from your waist but doesn’t leave, and the space between you fails to open up as Aki stalls for time. 

He can’t let you go, not yet. Because the moment you slip from his grasp, you might just be gone for good. 

“Aki,” you insist, pushing against him, “we’re going to fall or something, come on.”

The momentum shifts you both against the railing and your feet slip from under you, but Aki stands firm and grabs onto you. Pulling you back with the best of his strength, your balance falls off-kilter and you barrel straight into him, toppling the pair of you both through the open window and onto the carpeted living room floor inside. 

It’s almost certain that the noise will have woken Power & Denji in the other room, but by some miracle they don’t. (If they had, they’d immediately storm out to wreak fresh hell upon both Aki and yourself.) Those kids could sleep through the apocalypse, Aki thinks to himself as he adjusts to the sensation of your presence atop him, your hands splayed either side of his head to lift yourself so that you don’t suffocate him. 

“Hi,” he offers lamely, in lieu of any more coherent choice of words. 

With a stunned laugh as your gaze flickers across his face, you reply with equal ineloquence, “yeah, hi.”

This is all far too clichéd, he thinks, something contrived from those awful cheesy romance movies (that he swears he hates, but can’t help gravitating towards on occasion). And yet you are just as flustered as he is in this moment, bashful in the way that you try to do everything you can to avoid holding eye contact, not quite aware enough to realise that you can get up and move away if you really want to- even with his hands still splayed out across your lower back from his attempts to catch you. 

You are resplendent framed by the hanging glow of the moon, an ethereal backlight that paints you more like a mysterious spectre than the mere human atop him that you are. The quirk of your lips as you rest in stasis with him is all too enticing, the subtle dip of flesh as your teeth sneak out to bite down upon the lower one. 

“You deserve better,” he says at last, tone deliberately at a whisper and yet so loud in the quiet hours of the early morning. The words practically echo off the walls, bounce around in the space like an errant pinball, and reflect back at you tenfold. “I know I’ve barely even been a good enough friend to you lately. But I could have tried, maybe. ”

“Aki…” you breathe. “You don’t mean that.”

“I do,” he says. “I could have been there for you, treated you the way you should have been all this time.” 

Aki knows that they’re empty words at this point, knows you know that there’s no point to him even saying all of this right now. But the words fail to cease spilling from him, the only thing keeping him from pulling you close and kissing you breathless and making even more of a fool of himself in this situation. 

He has loved you for years; it isn’t something that you’re unaware of. 

In fact, you were the one that had confessed to him first. 

With tearful eyes, repeated apologies, saying that you know you shouldn’t have fallen for a coworker but that you had anyway and you just had to tell him before it ate you up from the inside out. 

He had let you down gently- or, he supposes in hindsight, not entirely- and you had moved on with your life. Even started dating someone else. The same someone that had caused you to show up to his apartment once more, having appeared at his front door with equally tearful eyes. (Only this time it was almost a relief that it wasn’t actually his fault.)

And in the time it takes for him to get out of his own head, you have already made the first move. 

Your lips slot against his like they were made to be there, soft and a little desperate as you push into him, shifting your weight from your palms to your elbows. Aki gasps against your mouth, but returns the kiss with renewed enthusiasm, pressing his hands a little deeper against you in an attempt to feel you even more wholly. 

“You still…?” he asks as you pull back to breathe. 

Receptive and understanding, you nod and press one more kiss to the side of his mouth. “Yeah, I do. Took me a bit too much to realise it. I just couldn’t get over you, I guess.”

“I’m sorry,” says Aki, sense finally returning as he gently pushes you away and sits upright. You balance rested on your knees in front of him as he runs a hand through his hair, pushing his bangs from his eyes. “You know why we couldn’t make things work in the first place, don’t you? It isn’t fair to you.”

“Of course I know that,” you sigh, “but that doesn’t stop how I feel about you.”

And, truly, Aki has no possible refute to this.

Even in spite of the shortened lifespan, a life without him had only proven to put you in more pain. Whilst he is still around, the very least he can do for you is to make you happy. 

“Okay,” he concedes. Your hand finds his in the space between you and holds on tight. “We’ll give things a try.”

Aki supposes, as you dip in close to kiss him once more, that the urge to make an impulsive decision earlier was harder to ignore than he had expected it to be. 

When day starts to break, creeps in through the open windows and washes his apartment with the golden glow of a fresh start, he can’t exactly say it wasn’t worth it. 

You wait for him on the balcony whilst Aki grabs his cigarettes and as he comes back into the living room he pauses for a moment at the sight of you nestled comfortably amongst the stars. 

Framed by the curtains that flutter in the gentle early morning breeze, you are picturesque right now in the most tragic of ways. The downturn of your lips and the somber stare that you give to the block of apartments to the left hurts to observe, right down to his very core, but Aki can’t deny that you are beautiful in this lighting. 

“Here,” you call, tossing a lighter across to him. He catches it with one hand as he joins your side, leaning with his back to the railing just like you are. “I thought you could use a new one, yesterday you were saying that yours was running low.”

“You’re thoughtful,” he quips, holding a fresh flame to the cigarette between his teeth. “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Pulsating silence passes as Aki inhales deep, feels the familiar billowing rush of smoke upon his lungs, and blows it back out. You watch him as he does, inquisition in your narrowed eyes, like a million thoughts are bustling around beneath the surface of your mind. 

Then, suddenly, you pluck the cigarette from between his fingers and take a long, exaggerated drag. 

“So, that would be several minutes shaved from my lifespan, right?”

“Don’t do that,” Aki protests, reaching across to steal it back from you.

“And why not?” You fold your arms across your chest, leaning back against the railing so that Aki has to lean over you if he stands any chance of retrieving the cigarette dangling loosely between your lips. “It’s what you do, isn’t it? That’s the whole reason you still smoke- you’re dying anyway, so fuck it, why not make it worse?”

“It’s not like that,” he lies. 

“Of course not.” 

His left hand flies to your waist to keep you steady, knee pressed between your thighs as he uses the right to try and reclaim the small white stick. Your head curves back further still, arcing your stomach up against his and pressing your bodies so close together that you might just stand the risk of amalgamating together. 

Wind whips around your heads as you practically dangle out over the balcony of the highrise apartment building and Aki’s bangs obscure his eyes in all of the chaos of the moment. Below, cars race past and he can hear their engines speed close and shoot away again. Closer, your ribcage expands against his own chest as your lungs heave oxygen into your system. 

Aki’s fingers hover above your jaw, where the quickly burning ash of the cigarette tip threatens to drop and sear your chin. You look up at him with owlish blinking eyes, shocked into silence by the lengths he has gone to just to get you to give such a silly little thing back. 

“Fine,” you whisper, spitting it out to one side. It tumbles from your lips and descends into the sinking void of the urban jungle beneath, spinning and twirling like a freefalling dancer in slow motion. Aki watches it disappear before his gaze trails back across to your thin-drawn lips, to the eyes boring small holes into his skull. “Are you happy now?”

“It was a waste to throw it like that,” he says quietly, before adding, “thank you.”

“You’re insufferable,” you retort, palms pressing against his shoulders to urge him to move away. 

And yet his hand still lingers near your face, backs of his fingers tracing idly along your cheek. The other loosens from your waist but doesn’t leave, and the space between you fails to open up as Aki stalls for time. 

He can’t let you go, not yet. Because the moment you slip from his grasp, you might just be gone for good. 

“Aki,” you insist, pushing against him, “we’re going to fall or something, come on.”

The momentum shifts you both against the railing and your feet slip from under you, but Aki stands firm and grabs onto you. Pulling you back with the best of his strength, your balance falls off-kilter and you barrel straight into him, toppling the pair of you both through the open window and onto the carpeted living room floor inside. 

It’s almost certain that the noise will have woken Power & Denji in the other room, but by some miracle they don’t. (If they had, they’d immediately storm out to wreak fresh hell upon both Aki and yourself.) Those kids could sleep through the apocalypse, Aki thinks to himself as he adjusts to the sensation of your presence atop him, your hands splayed either side of his head to lift yourself so that you don’t suffocate him. 

“Hi,” he offers lamely, in lieu of any more coherent choice of words. 

With a stunned laugh as your gaze flickers across his face, you reply with equal ineloquence, “yeah, hi.”

This is all far too clichéd, he thinks, something contrived from those awful cheesy romance movies (that he swears he hates, but can’t help gravitating towards on occasion). And yet you are just as flustered as he is in this moment, bashful in the way that you try to do everything you can to avoid holding eye contact, not quite aware enough to realise that you can get up and move away if you really want to- even with his hands still splayed out across your lower back from his attempts to catch you. 

You are resplendent framed by the hanging glow of the moon, an ethereal backlight that paints you more like a mysterious spectre than the mere human atop him that you are. The quirk of your lips as you rest in stasis with him is all too enticing, the subtle dip of flesh as your teeth sneak out to bite down upon the lower one. 

“You deserve better,” he says at last, tone deliberately at a whisper and yet so loud in the quiet hours of the early morning. The words practically echo off the walls, bounce around in the space like an errant pinball, and reflect back at you tenfold. “I know I’ve barely even been a good enough friend to you lately. But I could have tried, maybe. ”

“Aki…” you breathe. “You don’t mean that.”

“I do,” he says. “I could have been there for you, treated you the way you should have been all this time.” 

Aki knows that they’re empty words at this point, knows you know that there’s no point to him even saying all of this right now. But the words fail to cease spilling from him, the only thing keeping him from pulling you close and kissing you breathless and making even more of a fool of himself in this situation. 

He has loved you for years; it isn’t something that you’re unaware of. 

In fact, you were the one that had confessed to him first. 

With tearful eyes, repeated apologies, saying that you know you shouldn’t have fallen for a coworker but that you had anyway and you just had to tell him before it ate you up from the inside out. 

He had let you down gently- or, he supposes in hindsight, not entirely- and you had moved on with your life. Even started dating someone else. The same someone that had caused you to show up to his apartment once more, having appeared at his front door with equally tearful eyes. (Only this time it was almost a relief that it wasn’t actually his fault.)

And in the time it takes for him to get out of his own head, you have already made the first move. 

Your lips slot against his like they were made to be there, soft and a little desperate as you push into him, shifting your weight from your palms to your elbows. Aki gasps against your mouth, but returns the kiss with renewed enthusiasm, pressing his hands a little deeper against you in an attempt to feel you even more wholly. 

“You still…?” he asks as you pull back to breathe. 

Receptive and understanding, you nod and press one more kiss to the side of his mouth. “Yeah, I do. Took me a bit too much to realise it. I just couldn’t get over you, I guess.”

“I’m sorry,” says Aki, sense finally returning as he gently pushes you away and sits upright. You balance rested on your knees in front of him as he runs a hand through his hair, pushing his bangs from his eyes. “You know why we couldn’t make things work in the first place, don’t you? It isn’t fair to you.”

“Of course I know that,” you sigh, “but that doesn’t stop how I feel about you.”

And, truly, Aki has no possible refute to this.

Even in spite of the shortened lifespan, a life without him had only proven to put you in more pain. Whilst he is still around, the very least he can do for you is to make you happy. 

“Okay,” he concedes. Your hand finds his in the space between you and holds on tight. “We’ll give things a try.”

Aki supposes, as you dip in close to kiss him once more, that the urge to make an impulsive decision earlier was harder to ignore than he had expected it to be. 

When day starts to break, creeps in through the open windows and washes his apartment with the golden glow of a fresh start, he can’t exactly say it wasn’t worth it. 

You wait for him on the balcony whilst Aki grabs his cigarettes and as he comes back into the living room he pauses for a moment at the sight of you nestled comfortably amongst the stars. 

Framed by the curtains that flutter in the gentle early morning breeze, you are picturesque right now in the most tragic of ways. The downturn of your lips and the somber stare that you give to the block of apartments to the left hurts to observe, right down to his very core, but Aki can’t deny that you are beautiful in this lighting. 

“Here,” you call, tossing a lighter across to him. He catches it with one hand as he joins your side, leaning with his back to the railing just like you are. “I thought you could use a new one, yesterday you were saying that yours was running low.”

“You’re thoughtful,” he quips, holding a fresh flame to the cigarette between his teeth. “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Pulsating silence passes as Aki inhales deep, feels the familiar billowing rush of smoke upon his lungs, and blows it back out. You watch him as he does, inquisition in your narrowed eyes, like a million thoughts are bustling around beneath the surface of your mind. 

Then, suddenly, you pluck the cigarette from between his fingers and take a long, exaggerated drag. 

“So, that would be several minutes shaved from my lifespan, right?”

“Don’t do that,” Aki protests, reaching across to steal it back from you.

“And why not?” You fold your arms across your chest, leaning back against the railing so that Aki has to lean over you if he stands any chance of retrieving the cigarette dangling loosely between your lips. “It’s what you do, isn’t it? That’s the whole reason you still smoke- you’re dying anyway, so fuck it, why not make it worse?”

“It’s not like that,” he lies. 

“Of course not.” 

His left hand flies to your waist to keep you steady, knee pressed between your thighs as he uses the right to try and reclaim the small white stick. Your head curves back further still, arcing your stomach up against his and pressing your bodies so close together that you might just stand the risk of amalgamating together. 

Wind whips around your heads as you practically dangle out over the balcony of the highrise apartment building and Aki’s bangs obscure his eyes in all of the chaos of the moment. Below, cars race past and he can hear their engines speed close and shoot away again. Closer, your ribcage expands against his own chest as your lungs heave oxygen into your system. 

Aki’s fingers hover above your jaw, where the quickly burning ash of the cigarette tip threatens to drop and sear your chin. You look up at him with owlish blinking eyes, shocked into silence by the lengths he has gone to just to get you to give such a silly little thing back. 

“Fine,” you whisper, spitting it out to one side. It tumbles from your lips and descends into the sinking void of the urban jungle beneath, spinning and twirling like a freefalling dancer in slow motion. Aki watches it disappear before his gaze trails back across to your thin-drawn lips, to the eyes boring small holes into his skull. “Are you happy now?”

“It was a waste to throw it like that,” he says quietly, before adding, “thank you.”

“You’re insufferable,” you retort, palms pressing against his shoulders to urge him to move away. 

And yet his hand still lingers near your face, backs of his fingers tracing idly along your cheek. The other loosens from your waist but doesn’t leave, and the space between you fails to open up as Aki stalls for time. 

He can’t let you go, not yet. Because the moment you slip from his grasp, you might just be gone for good. 

“Aki,” you insist, pushing against him, “we’re going to fall or something, come on.”

The momentum shifts you both against the railing and your feet slip from under you, but Aki stands firm and grabs onto you. Pulling you back with the best of his strength, your balance falls off-kilter and you barrel straight into him, toppling the pair of you both through the open window and onto the carpeted living room floor inside. 

It’s almost certain that the noise will have woken Power & Denji in the other room, but by some miracle they don’t. (If they had, they’d immediately storm out to wreak fresh hell upon both Aki and yourself.) Those kids could sleep through the apocalypse, Aki thinks to himself as he adjusts to the sensation of your presence atop him, your hands splayed either side of his head to lift yourself so that you don’t suffocate him. 

“Hi,” he offers lamely, in lieu of any more coherent choice of words. 

With a stunned laugh as your gaze flickers across his face, you reply with equal ineloquence, “yeah, hi.”

This is all far too clichéd, he thinks, something contrived from those awful cheesy romance movies (that he swears he hates, but can’t help gravitating towards on occasion). And yet you are just as flustered as he is in this moment, bashful in the way that you try to do everything you can to avoid holding eye contact, not quite aware enough to realise that you can get up and move away if you really want to- even with his hands still splayed out across your lower back from his attempts to catch you. 

You are resplendent framed by the hanging glow of the moon, an ethereal backlight that paints you more like a mysterious spectre than the mere human atop him that you are. The quirk of your lips as you rest in stasis with him is all too enticing, the subtle dip of flesh as your teeth sneak out to bite down upon the lower one. 

“You deserve better,” he says at last, tone deliberately at a whisper and yet so loud in the quiet hours of the early morning. The words practically echo off the walls, bounce around in the space like an errant pinball, and reflect back at you tenfold. “I know I’ve barely even been a good enough friend to you lately. But I could have tried, maybe. ”

“Aki…” you breathe. “You don’t mean that.”

“I do,” he says. “I could have been there for you, treated you the way you should have been all this time.” 

Aki knows that they’re empty words at this point, knows you know that there’s no point to him even saying all of this right now. But the words fail to cease spilling from him, the only thing keeping him from pulling you close and kissing you breathless and making even more of a fool of himself in this situation. 

He has loved you for years; it isn’t something that you’re unaware of. 

In fact, you were the one that had confessed to him first. 

With tearful eyes, repeated apologies, saying that you know you shouldn’t have fallen for a coworker but that you had anyway and you just had to tell him before it ate you up from the inside out. 

He had let you down gently- or, he supposes in hindsight, not entirely- and you had moved on with your life. Even started dating someone else. The same someone that had caused you to show up to his apartment once more, having appeared at his front door with equally tearful eyes. (Only this time it was almost a relief that it wasn’t actually his fault.)

And in the time it takes for him to get out of his own head, you have already made the first move. 

Your lips slot against his like they were made to be there, soft and a little desperate as you push into him, shifting your weight from your palms to your elbows. Aki gasps against your mouth, but returns the kiss with renewed enthusiasm, pressing his hands a little deeper against you in an attempt to feel you even more wholly. 

“You still…?” he asks as you pull back to breathe. 

Receptive and understanding, you nod and press one more kiss to the side of his mouth. “Yeah, I do. Took me a bit too much to realise it. I just couldn’t get over you, I guess.”

“I’m sorry,” says Aki, sense finally returning as he gently pushes you away and sits upright. You balance rested on your knees in front of him as he runs a hand through his hair, pushing his bangs from his eyes. “You know why we couldn’t make things work in the first place, don’t you? It isn’t fair to you.”

“Of course I know that,” you sigh, “but that doesn’t stop how I feel about you.”

And, truly, Aki has no possible refute to this.

Even in spite of the shortened lifespan, a life without him had only proven to put you in more pain. Whilst he is still around, the very least he can do for you is to make you happy. 

“Okay,” he concedes. Your hand finds his in the space between you and holds on tight. “We’ll give things a try.”

Aki supposes, as you dip in close to kiss him once more, that the urge to make an impulsive decision earlier was harder to ignore than he had expected it to be. 

When day starts to break, creeps in through the open windows and washes his apartment with the golden glow of a fresh start, he can’t exactly say it wasn’t worth it.