slow passion to that deliberate progress

Title: slow passion to that deliberate progress
Pairing(s): Aiba/Sho
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1181
Summary: "Time flies when you are doing nothing. Believe me, I know." + Midnight snails and kissing-streets.
Notes: I thought writing Sakuraiba was going to be a big pain in the butt, but I was proved wrong. It is insane amounts of fun and giggles. Don't ask me why, though, I couldn't tell you. :D This little tidbit is part of my absolutely monstrous 'high school summer vacation!AU,' which is also insane amounts of shits and giggles, though more shits ("SHIT! Where is this going?!" etc. etc.). I will finish it though, because its loose ends and unfinished storylines nag me in the middle of the night. And during the day.

Some background: Aiba's summer homework/experiment is to find snails and figure out how fast they all "run" in different temperatures. Sho's has nothing to do with snails but he volunteered to help anyway. Oh, chesuto. ♥

Lastly, the title of this ficbit excerpt thing comes from Considering the Snail by Thom Gunn.



Aiba goes hunting for snails at midnight.

He sets the alarm clock on his cell phone and then hides it under his pillow so that his brother won’t hear it go off (because if he does, he will surely tell, and then there will be hell to pay from his mother for months and months). Everything else he does normally: he sets the table like he always has and eats dinner much too fast (his father congratulates him on such a healthy appetite and his mother always says that one day he will choke on her good food, so appreciate it while he still can) and watches television before his mother comes and tells him to go to sleep, it is almost midnight.

"Oh!” Aiba says, startled. He rushes to turn the television off. "Already?”

"Time flies when you are doing nothing,” Aiba’s mother tells him as she watches him walk to his room. "Believe me, I know.”

When his phone goes off he slips out of bed as quietly as he can and tiptoes to the door, grabbing a sweatshirt along the way. The darkness of the hallway shocks him and only now does he realize that his whole house is overfilling with murky shadow. Only the tiny beams of appliances light his way to the front door.

Aiba freezes, clutching his sweatshirt to his chest. He is afraid, suddenly, that he will bump into one tiny thing and it will cause some chain reaction so that the entire house, at the end, will be in shambles. Surely he is clumsy enough to do something like that; he is Aiba Masaki, after all.

He takes a step forward. One, two, three—four more—not too much pressure on the floor, now—

Miraculously, he makes it to and out his front door without even making the floors whine. As soon as the door shuts behind him, he takes off running down the street, throwing his head back and laughing to himself along the way until he reaches the corner.

There, Sho is waiting for him.

"Sho!” Aiba says, louder than he should, perhaps, but he knows that all the houses here are just as dark and sleepy as his was. "I didn’t—you’re here!”

Sho looks at him and Aiba can see that he would rather be at home in bed, but he is here anyway and that fills Aiba’s chest with some kind of inexplicable joy. He runs over to Sho and throws his arms around him, giggling, because it is all he can do to express himself right now.

"Masaki,” Sho whispers. "We are in public.”

Aiba laughs. "It’s midnight, Sho-chan! We’re not even in the city. Nobody’s awake here past ten o’clock and you know it.” He takes Sho’s hand in his and pulls hard, because he cannot, cannot wait to go. "Come on! It’s snail time.”

There is a pond that Sho says his sister played at when she was little that is practically overflowing with slimy things, so why not go there? Aiba agrees, and lets Sho lead the way.

What would be nice, Aiba thinks as they walk on in silence, would be to find some snails tonight. Two ideally, and that seems easy, but three would be nice and four, that would be more than enough, that’s exactly what he wants—

(—and maybe he also wants a night with Sho—past midnight, when it is not only the shadows that are out, but the scent of cool summer and the endless number of stars—maybe that is what he actually wants. His chest is still filled with happiness, with Sho!s, with things he has only thought about at night, smiling—)

"There it is,” Sho says, pointing with his free hand. "See, it’s not even near a playground or a school. So you don’t have to worry about depriving the kids, or whatever you said.”

"Of course—why would I take away their fun? Ooh, Sho-chan, this looks kinda…” Aiba runs to the edge of the water and can already feel the mud seeping into his sneakers. All around him there is a raw, earthy smell, and all kinds of plant life at his feet, both living and dead. There is even a rotting log.

Snail territory, Aiba thinks. Perfect! He turns around and gives a thumbs-up to Sho, who waves back.

With his pocket flashlight (because Aiba Masaki never leaves the house without a pocket flashlight, for emergencies such as this one), Aiba collects two snails, both almost the size of his thumb-tip. They are the easiest to find—hanging out on the dead log, oozing along lazily—but the rest he has to dig for, which is no problem at all.

He has the fingers of his right hand submerged in inky water when Sho squats down next to him, knee-to-knee.

"Please help,” Aiba whispers. "They’re not easy to find when they’re underwater.”

Sho takes the flashlight from Aiba and moves the beam onto the water. "Better?"

It is more help than Aiba expected, and he happily pulls out tiny shells from the wet soil around the pond. He ends up with four out of ten shells that have things living inside of them, but this is, of course, a wonderful turnout. And Sho has even brought a jar for the snails, which just proves—well, Aiba doesn’t know what it proves. But he is grateful anyway.

"Step one is complete,” Aiba says, only a little sleepily, as they walk back to his house. "Now I just have to race these guys, in different temperatures…make some graphs…you know, Sho-chan.”

He hears Sho chuckle, but the sound is far away (far, far away, like the lands in fairy tales, Aiba thinks, the ones that float on clouds). Amidst all the steadily growing fuzziness in his head he thinks oh this is so nice, I like being this way and he can feel his heart jumping sporadically in his hand, which Sho is holding tightly. He wishes his house were farther—in the next town, maybe, or another country—just so they could go on like this.

Sho says, "I know you’re asleep in your head, but wake up, because we’re here.”

Aiba says, too high on hand-holding and castles in the sky and finding six snails and Sho, "I’m not leaving until you kiss me.”

(His front door does not open until much, much later.)

Under his covers at three in the morning, finally, Aiba finds that no matter what he does he cannot be as comfortable as he was while walking home just an hour before. He fluffs his pillow and hugs one and sheds a blanket and gets another, but his hands are always too cold. So are his feet.

He lies awake for the next few hours, his tingling lips pressed together and his mind thinking, singing, I have six snails and a boyfriend who kisses me on the street in our neighborhood when everyone else is asleep.

Eventually, he falls asleep to this.