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It all started, Takasugi supposes later, when Kamui transferred to 3-Z from Yato High. From where he sat at the back of the room, with his feet up on his desk, he noticed the Chinese girl walk in looking more like she wanted to kill someone than she usually did. He noticed, and he didn’t give a shit. Following after her was a boy who looked older and yet exactly the same, especially in the way that his cheeks seemed to still be full of his breakfast.
Their lazy-ass teacher stumbled in late, as usual – “I got lost on the path of life,” he said, and the glasses boy yelled, “You’re not Kakashi-sensei! Cut it out already!” As he does every morning without fail, he droned, “Takasugi-kuuun, get your feet off the desk,” and as he does every morning without fail, Takasugi didn’t listen to him.
Ginpachi-sensei drowsily introduced the new student, “Make sure you’re nice to him because I’m pretty sure he’s a delinquent,” and took it upon himself to allocate Kamui to the seat next to Takasugi’s – the one that was spare only because Takasugi himself had personally seen to it.
“Hi,” Kamui said to him, all fake smile and happy eyes and it was really clear that he was very different from his sister. “What happened to the last person that sat here?”
Kamui was on his right so Takasugi was able to look sideways at him as he said, “Them? They had to go.”
“Ohh~,” he breathed in answer, amused and pleased and interested, and he was very different from his sister.
.
Takasugi didn’t normally talk to Okita. They were in the same class and they both did kendo but he’d never been inclined to have anything to do with him. In any case, Okita was usually busy antagonising the Chinese girl and Hijikata (and pretty much everyone else, come to it) – and generally seemed to have his own niche, so even if he seemed like one of the more tolerable of Takasugi’s classmates, he honestly wasn’t going to be bothered.
So he wasn’t exactly sure what the hell what was going on when, just as he’d finished getting changed after kendo practice, Okita waltzed over to him, back in his crumpled gakuran and the ever-present Superman T-shirt, and said, “Hey, Big China and I are walkin’ home together. You wanna come with?”
Takasugi’s mind stumbled over Big China – there was no way that was anyone other than Kamui – but he managed to sneer and say, “Why would I want to go anywhere with you losers?”
“Ehh?” Okita complained like he did when Hijikata refused to let him copy his answers. And then, to Takasugi’s absolute horror, Okita sidled up to his side, started poking him in the ribs, and said, his breath hot on Takasugi’s ear, “We’re getting nikuman,” in an infuriatingly singsong voice.
“If I agree, will you stop fucking touching me?”
.
Okita tried to connive Kamui and Takasugi into paying for the nikuman by themselves, and they stomped on his toes in perfect coordination and said, “Pay or you don’t get any,” and Kamui looked at Takasugi with completely unguarded curiosity even as Okita cursed in the background.
Takasugi also got a can of coffee from the too-bright store because he was planning to finish the new assignment they’d just been given overnight so that he didn’t have to do it later. Okita got a carton of milk, and Kamui got a soda that was purple and had a green wrapper and that Takasugi couldn’t bring himself to think about for more than half a second.
They meandered down the street in the general direction of their homes – somehow they all lived relatively closely to each other. Some guy in baggy jeans and too many shirts who was riding a skateboard ran into Kamui and subsequently tried to start a fight, getting up in Kamui’s cheerful face and demanding that he apologise.
“What the hell should he apologise for?” Takasugi grumbled irritably, “Walking on the pathway? That an offence, officer?”
“Oi, oi, what’s this?” Okita started, somehow looking down on the thug-wannabe even though he was considerably shorter. “Isn’t it your fault in the first place for riding a skateboard down a narrow path like an idiot? What are you, twelve?”
Kamui, his smile still unmoving, said calmly, “That’s okay. If it’s a fight he wants,” his eyes cracked open, giving him an altogether more serious expression, “then I’ll just kill him.”
In the face of all three of them, it was probably no surprise that he ran in the other direction, looking terrified.
.
Somehow they become friends. Actually, not somehow, because Takasugi knew that Kamui found him interesting and he was certain, even if he didn't have any proof, that he must have said something to Okita about it, because Okita started using each and every excuse under the sun to get the three of them to hang out together.
Some things were pretty innocuous, like eating lunch together, but then after a while of eating lunch together, doing stuff after kendo – or karate, in Kamui’s case – practice was “natural” (or so Okita said). Pretty soon the two scheming bastards managed to wrangle him into eating dinner at their houses; even if Okita’s place was amusing (the very existence of Mitsuba was an endless source of insult material), dinner at Kamui’s house was wild. They made enough food for roughly six times the number of people present, and even then Kamui and his sister treated it like a war zone, jealously guarding their food while trying to pinch each other’s and covertly aiming kicks under the table.
Takasugi privately viewed that as a traumatic experience, having to watch human beings eat like they were going into hibernation for three years.
After dinner at Kamui’s house – “Don’t come back!” Kagura yelled at Okita as they left – Okita smiled evilly at Takasugi and said, “Well, I guess it’s your turn next, huh?”
(He didn’t have a choice, apparently, and it hurt his cause that he was actually warming up to those bastards, so he had them for dinner; his parents were as stiff and upright as always, said how good it was that he was finally being social and that maybe they could be a good influence on him – although they did eye Kamui’s braid with distaste.
Those assholes – the ones he now called his friends, apparently – had smiled as if they were innocent, hardworking children and assured his parents that they were “Doing their best to correct Shinsuke-kun’s unfortunate personality,” in sickly sweet voices.)
.
They weren’t friends in the way that most people their age were friends. They weren’t the chat-about-inane-things kind or the share-all-our-deepest-feelings kind; they were the kind that insulted each other, intentionally pissed each other off and mooched off each other as much as possible.
They were also the kind that didn’t let anyone give any of them any shit. A tiny, miniscule, microscopic part of Takasugi thought that it was a little nice to know that there were people that had his back, even if those people were on his back more than anyone else.
.
Just when he thought, about five months after the first domino had been tipped over and set this whole thing off, that they had a normal thing going, it changed.
They were at Takasugi’s house studying, because they had a math test coming up and even they need to pass school somehow. He’d been steadily completing revision problems when he realised that the other two had gone to the kitchen for drinks a while back and hadn’t yet returned. A little concerned – his parents were loaded and it showed all over the house and if anything happened he’d see hell for it – Takasugi went to check on them.
He didn’t know what he expected, really. Kamui eating everything in the vicinity, maybe. Okita mixing tobasco sauce with everything, maybe. Kamui sitting on the island, Okita standing between his legs, the pair of them making out? Nah.
“What do you bastards think you’re doing in someone else’s kitchen?”
They pulled apart from each other slowly, the bastards, and there wasn’t a single trace of embarrassment or shame or anything like that on either of the faces. Takasugi crossed his arms, scowling at them; Kamui still had his fingers all twisted in Okita’s hair, and Okita hadn’t moved to take his hands off the redhead’s hips.
“Kissing,” Okita said as if Takasugi was the stupid one is that idiotic situation. “You know, where you put your mouths together? Thought it was obvious.”
“Do I really have to ask why you’re kissing in my kitchen or are you just gonna be sensible and tell me?” Please don’t be dating, he thought, because then things would probably get gross and emotional.
“Because it feels good,” Kamui said, and Okita nodded.
“Yeah, we ain’t in love or nothin’,” Okita added.
Takasugi just sort of grunted at them and got some Yakult out of the fridge (there was always Yakult in his fridge). If there was no emotional shit going on, he didn’t care what they did or didn’t do.
“You can kiss us too, if you want,” Kamui said, and when he turned back around they were peering expectantly at him. He crossed the room and sat his Yakult on the counter to the left of Kamui, and he wasn’t nervous because he had nothing to lose, not with those guys, and it only just occurred to him how close they’d grown.
“You’re offering that,” he said flatly to Kamui, focusing his single eye carefully on the other boy’s face just in case there was a tiny chance that they were playing him. “You’re really offering that.”
“We’re both offering that,” Okita said, took his left hand off Kamui’s hip to place it solidly on Takasugi’s shoulder. Takasugi shifted a little, looked at Okita, and decided why the fuck not.
They kissed hard and needy and pretty much the exact opposite of how people who love each other do. Okita’s arms were firm around his waist and when Takasugi slid a hand into his hair, he found that one of Kamui’s still lingered there and tangled their fingers together; Kamui’s fingers squeezed his gently and Takasugi wondered how long they’d been doing this shit without him for because Okita was way too good with his mouth.
Remembering his Yakult and the studying and not wanting to get hard from kissing such a jackass, Takasugi pressed against Okita’s chest, and they broke off the kiss.
“Yakult’s gettin’ warm,” he grumbled, and when he made to walk out of the room Kamui whined, like actually whined, so he stopped to oblige him, kissing him soft and slow and it was quite different but not too bad. He used pushed away from the island with one hand, snagged his Yakult and walked out, calling back, “We’ve gotta fucking study, morons.”
“Nerd,” Okita hollered, but it sounded affectionate.