MHA smut

circumbinary orbit

"Hey, Amajiki," Hadou says. Her hand fists in the back of his uniform jacket and gives it a tug. When he turns to look at her, she's staring up at him with those big, bright eyes. "How long have you and Toogata been together?"

Tamaki glances over at Eri in alarm, but she seems oblivious to the conversation, humming softly to herself and kicking her feet against her chair legs as she colors in a notebook. Not that she can't know about Mirio and Tamaki. He'd be surprised if she hasn't already taken notice. But he feels like he has his hands full already with the look that Hadou is giving him, and he doesn't need to be asked invasive questions by a seven-year-old too.

He slides his attention back to Hadou. She's sitting very close to him on the floor, helping him break down a board game they'd been playing with Eri just a few minutes ago. Or she had been helping him, before she'd stopped slotting the cards back into their spot in the box to lean in for her gentle interrogation.

"A little while," Tamaki replies. Evasively, but not entirely on purpose.

Not even he knows how long it's been, really. Long enough that it's one of the basic truths of Tamaki's life, the foundation that everything he is is built on. Part of him knows that it's not entirely healthy to form so much of your identity around another person, but even if he doesn't have a lot of confidence in most things, one thing he does have is that Mirio will still be beside him tomorrow and every other day of his life.

"Who confessed first?" Hadou asks. "Was it dramatic? Were you nervous? Was it in middle school?"

"No one really...confessed...," Tamaki says, but Hadou's hand is tugging at his uniform again as though she doesn't already have his full attention.

From anyone else, this onslaught of words and physical contact would be like a sourness in his stomach or a grip around his lungs. From Hadou it's friendship. One that doesn't usually make Tamaki feel seasick, which is significant, because the vast majority of his interpersonal interactions do.

"I know, it was love at first sight, right?" she says. "I remember the story! You were new at school and he came to talk to you."

Tamaki feels himself flush at her phrasing. Love at first sight seems like an overly romantic way to put it when it felt more like a shift in his entire reality, like a change in the laws of physics, but she's not wrong. They had instantly fit into place together like two sides of a buckle sliding home and locking together, or a positively-charged magnet finding its negative. Tamaki had felt it from the moment he'd looked up into Mirio's eager, smiling face, and he's never paused once to question it. Has never wanted to or needed to, and doesn't think he ever will.

"Yeah," he replies, keeping it short. He knows if he starts talking about Mirio, he'll only get picked on more. Hadou in particular seems to be a little more merciless, if unintentionally, than others about the gleam he gets in his eye when the topic comes up, but of course he's less sensitive with her when it comes to these sorts of things too. "He was shining."

"Shining," she repeats, her hand flattening out against his back. It feels warm there. "You always say that about everyone, even though they're just people! Mysterious...."

She seems to have lost her train of thought, shifting away from probing into Tamaki's uninteresting love life as she looks out across Eri's room. But of course, Tamaki, being his own worst enemy, opens his mouth and brings her back.

"Mirio shines most of all, though."

Her attention returns to him, eyes sparkling, smiling mouth betraying her amusement, her expression like she knows something he doesn't. She obviously doesn't, though, because if she did, she would say it, pink lips and tongue curling eagerly around the words said in her cheerful, tambourine voice.