umisabaku:

Midorima tends to
associate Takao with laughter, because Takao is someone who always laughs.
Laughter is one of those very human things that Midorima didn’t know
much about until they’d escaped Teiko.

There wasn’t a lot of
laughter in Teiko.

After a few months
living on the JSDF base, Midorima corrects his initial understanding—laughter
isn’t inherently human. After all, the scientists in Teiko never laughed
either. It’s not something everyone does. In fact, he thinks the world could be
separated into two different types of people: those who laugh and those who
don’t.

(Not laughter in
general, that is. Most everyone laughs, at some point. But, Midorima thinks,
laughter can be a state of being. Either you’re the kind of person who laughs a
lot or you’re not. Midorima is not. In all fairness, he is fairly certain he
wouldn’t be, even if he hadn’t been raised in a lab.)

*

But it isn’t just
laughter—Takao is almost always making noise. Even when they’re studying
together—an activity that pretty much everyone agrees should be silent—Takao
sometimes hums to himself or taps his pencil against the desk. It bothered
Midorima at first, but not anymore. It’s another one of those things that makes
the outside world so different than Teiko—there was never any sounds in Teiko,
not like this.

And it’s another thing
that makes Takao so different from everyone else.

*

And still it takes him
entirely surprise, the first time he hears Takao sing. The basketball club goes
to a Karaoke bar (“For team building,” says Miyaji)—Midorima opts out of
singing (no amount of cajoling will convince him to give it a try) but Takao
nearly stops him from breathing.

He has to sit there
the entire time Takao sings and pretend that he doesn’t care at all—that the
sound means nothing to him. Because he thinks that if he doesn’t control
himself this way, he’ll get up and kiss Takao right in front of everyone, or do
something equally embarrassing. He wants to listen to the sound forever and
feels like so much loss when Takao’s turn stops and someone else gets up to
sing.

*

Then it’s just a
matter of catching Takao at it—it happens sometimes, in the same idle way that
Takao sometimes hums. It’s always too short, and Midorima always wishes there
was a way he could capture it forever (it would be too embarrassing to ask
Takao for a recording. He still can’t even admit that he likes the sound).

*

Someday, he thinks.
Someday he’ll tell Takao. Someday he’ll have the song forever.

But for now he keeps
it secret, because it seems like one of those things that no one else should
know.

A/N: Thanks for the
prompt, anon-friend! It was very similar to this prompt here and I almost
thought about combining them, but then thought they would both make interesting
follow-ups to this prompt here. Also, I freely admit this short has some
similarities to this short. Apparently I just like working a theme with these
two.