Chapter Text
200g of rice in the bowl. Pork: out of the deep fry. Whisked egg on the griddle. Slice the cutlet, onto the rice. Egg off the griddle, onto the pork. Ladle of stewed onions and broth on top, handful of peas. Pop on the lid, bag it with napkins and chopsticks.
Repeat until you die.
The constant mantra was the only thing that got Yuuri Katsuki through his weekdays in the sweltering hell where he made his livelihood. Trapped in thirty square feet of steaming steel for eight hours, the shimmering oil of the deep fryer and the greased griddle adding their heat to the humidity of August in New York, he sometimes wondered if he should have just swallowed his pride and ran home to Hasetsu after graduating college. Smelling like the delicately fragranced mineral waters of his parent’s onsen resort may have been preferable to the heavy cologne of fried pork and browned onions that now eternally clung to his person. Yuuri tried to think positively about these situations; the smell that permeated his clothes usually meant a few centimeters more coveted personal space for him on the train back home at night.
“Can I get two bowls, one no peas one no onions, please?”
“My pleasure!”
“Got any corn??”
“Sorry, no corn!”
Who the hell puts corn on Katsudon?
He hoped that his sweat-shiny face had performed an accommodating smile as the customer started fishing bills out of his pocket. Special requests always messed with his flow which was a death sentence in the middle of the lunch rush, but his razor thin profit margins kept him from posting NO SUBSTITUTIONS on his already sparse menu. Those slim margins kept him from doing plenty of things he wished he could do, not to mention the municipal red tape that tied up his business into making a product that only just barely resembled his mother’s beloved specialty dish. But he had to think positively about these situations; his katsudon lunch bowls were selling rather well, after all.
Even though he had to alter the recipe so that the eggs were cooked a little harder because the majority of his early customers had thought the gorgeously silky yolks were “raw and gross”. Even though he had to serve more than a standard go of rice per bowl to placate the frugal yet insatiable American stomach. Even though time constraints and archaic NYC Department of Health regulations forced him to take a perfect dish that deserved every single moment of luxurious simmering that one could allow, and turn it into a slapdash cart meal that was served up in a matter of seconds.
Yuuri had to think positively about these situations. Because honestly, he couldn’t afford to develop a Xanax addiction.
“No peas, no onions up! Arigatou gouzaimasu!”
“Can I get some forks with that?”
“Of course, enjoy!”
200 grams of rice in the bowl. Pre-pounded, pre-battered pork cutlet dropped in the fryer. Collect cash, make change. Crap, he had to pee, but that was a joke—it was barely 12:30, and he manned the cart alone until 6. Running across the street to the Starbucks bathrooms meant risking his entire operation, possibly even his residency status. Plainclothes cops and health inspectors always managed to pop out of the dense crowds of NYU students, salary workers, and vaping punks at the most inopportune times and an abandoned food cart was an impounded food cart and a forfeiture of his vendor’s license.
The retired vendor that had sold him the cart had told him he was insane: doing the shift alone, day after day, was the fastest way to an early grave. Yuuri had handed him eight grand for the “gently used” halal cart and he’d paid $20,000 to lease a food vending permit for two years from another old man (and frightfully good entrepreneur) who’d gotten one of the limited licenses back in the eighties for about $200.
“That’s extortion, Katsuki,” Takeshi had said to him over a beer in their tiny studio flat. “For $20,000 you could have leased an actual kitchen.”
“Yeah, for maybe a month. Twenty was fair, I saw some guy put down twenty seven on one of the message boards I’ve been lurking on.”
Nishigori frowned, his thick eyebrows coming together as he contemplated his friend’s situation deeply. Shifting on the uncomfortable IKEA stool they’d grabbed from the curb, he took a long pull from his bottle and swallowed thickly before sharing his genius. “You should have just tried to sell without one.”
Yuuri shook his head, glasses slipping down the bridge of his nose with the action. “That sounds like a really excellent way to get deported or something.”
“I guess I just don’t understand the point of graduating from Stern and then sticking around to dump all of your savings into a low-profit food cart.”
“Because it’s what I want to do, I guess.”
When it came down to it, what he couldn’t vocalize to his roommate was that he was horribly selfish and having control over his life direction was important to him. He had fully pitched the idea of going to NYU to his parents as a way of really honing his skills when it came time for him to take over the family business, but no one bought that for a second. You didn’t need to do a business degree as an exchange student in America to take over a small cash-run traditional onsen that you’d literally grown up working in. He just really didn’t want to spend his entire life on the path that everyone assumed he’d take from the moment he was born.
His parents were surprisingly unalarmed by his plans and had sent him across the world with hugs and a promise to help him if he ever found himself in any kind of pinch. His mom’s smiling eyes had seemed the most understanding. Her boy needed to get out of his hometown, see new faces, new places, grow, find himself.
Right now he found that he might seriously pee himself if he didn’t get to a bathroom.
The rush had died down as everyone hustled back to their afternoon commitments and now Yuuri had absolutely nothing to distract him from the pressure in his bladder. The mid-afternoon hours were the worst when it got slow and his mind had time to turn to anxious thoughts without orders or prep to concentrate on. Most often he would dwell on money, particularly the absence of it, and inevitably that would lead to the idea of failure, of going back home to Japan with absolutely nothing and having to face everyone back home with nothing whatsoever to show for all his time spent in New York.
But today was Thursday, which meant he was worrying about his mother and their weekly Skype chat to make sure that he was still alive and hadn’t ended up in a bathtub in Hell’s Kitchen with his kidneys missing.
“This city doesn’t have a lot of crime, mom,” he’d remind her. The entirety of Hiroko’s knowledge of New York City was fully based on a popular shoujo manga from the 80’s and in spite of her encouragement for Yuuri to broaden his horizons, she’d been vocal about her concern for her son’s safety when he’d announced he was moving to Manhattan for an extended period of study.
“Really? It’s America, right? Everyday I get worried you’ll be involved in a shooting!”
“That’s not really a problem here,” he lied, cleanly ignoring that headline he’d caught in the Post about a gang shooting at a funeral home on Flatbush Avenue. “Most of the crime you have to watch for is just, like, scammers and shady stuff like that.” He had never mentioned to her how much of his savings he’d put down for his vending license.
“Have you made any friends yet, Yuu-kun?” She’d moved on to his least favorite topic and he tried to put a smile on from where he was snuggled under his bedsheets in the lower bunk of the bed he shared with Takeshi.
“Sure, Nishigori-senpai.”
“Konban wa, ‘kaa-san,” Takeshi called down sleepily from the top bunk in the dark, his face half buried in his pillow. The old spring supports combined with his considerable weight caused the mattress to dip precariously low into Yuuri’s bunk space.
“Konban wa, Takeshi-kun,” she called back with a little laugh. Yuuri gazed quietly into the glow of his phone at her crinkle-eyed smile and, for a moment, regretted leaving home deeply. Her face softened as she considered her son from across the world, asking gently: “Any new friends?”
“Not yet, mom. I’m just so busy, you know?”
He wasn’t going to tell her about Cube-kun. Cube-kun was basically the closest thing to a friend that he had in the city besides Nishigori. She was crap at conversation, but she kept him company all day from her place across the way from his vending window; a giant black monolithic cube that served as the local meetup spot for Astor Place. Just as loyal as Hachiko, she waited there every day to greet him when he showed up bleary-eyed in the early morning hours, and was glad to pass the time with him in the evening until the van arrived to haul his cart to a commissary on 5th Avenue for cleaning and overnight storage.
Cube-kun listened silently to his worries and steadfastly watched over his business and customers, eternally balanced en pointe like his old ballet teacher seemed to be. Unfortunately, unlike Minako-sensei, she was not humanoid and couldn't watch the cart for him while he took a pee break.
Between his screaming bladder and the deeply troubling realization that he was beginning to consider an inanimate object one of his closest friends in the city, he had completely failed to greet a customer.
“Hi!”
The cheerful chirp of a greeting pulled him back to his job and he looked out the small window with wide, embarrassed eyes.
“Hello! Sorry! Sorry, what can I get you?”
“Hmmmm…” The young man was tiny, even by Asian standards, had a radiant and flawless dark complexion, was fashionable in a thrift shop sort of way, and was altogether strikingly beautiful. Likely a university student, Yuuri’s customer-profiling brain algorithm told him. He vaguely thought about the last time he went on a date and tried not to burst into tears.
The customer’s mouth turned up into a sweet smile, and it managed to out-dazzle the subtle golden streaks of highlighter that graced his cheekbones. It was a pure, piercing beam of wholesome realness in a city where most smiles from strangers were a tight-lipped signal that the owner was about to cheerfully commit homicide. “Can you do liiiiike...cha han?”
The request paired with his smile threw Yuuri off— its power managed to squash all his usual frustration with such a blatant disregard for his posted menu. “Oh, uh...sorry, it’s really just what’s on the menu.”
He reached out and tapped the small board next to the window. It read as follows:
KATSUDON - $9
Pork cutlet with egg and onions over steamed white rice.
Assorted Drinks In Cooler - $1
“So...just Katsudon.” The smile got a little bigger, but his dark eyes flicked back and forth between the menu and the vendor. “Okay! I guess I’ll try it! Must be your specialty, huh? Do you take Apple Pay?”
“Uh...cash. S-sorry.”
“Oh, dang. Uh,” he looked around for an ATM sign. Yuuri knew off-hand the location of every ATM within a three block radius, but the pee situation was getting dire. Desperate times overcame the strict social boundaries that controlled his anxieties.
“Listen. Do you want a free lunch?”
“Ummmm, I dunno! Haha, is this gonna get sketchy?”
“N-no! I just...I’ve had to go to the bathroom for three hours and I can’t just leave the cart alone. If you could just stand up in here for two minutes, I’ll give you an order for free!”
Yuuri figured he must have looked absolutely desperate because after hardly a moment of contemplation, a finger tapping his sharp chin, the guy nodded. “Sure thing fam, I got you.”
Without another word, Yuuri bolted out the side door and across the street, dodging an oncoming Lyft and rushing the door to the Starbucks. Punching the door code he’d memorized and thanking the universe that there was no line, he locked the door behind him and unzipped his fly.
Sweet relief.
A minute later when he got back to his truck, Fashion Boy was inside taking selfies.
“Everything good?” Yuuri asked, standing in the door, slightly winded from the sprint back across the street.
“Huh?” Fashion Boy looked away from the front-facing camera of his phone (...was that a Hamtaro case??) and grinned. “Oh. Yeah! For a second I got kind of worried! Like, maybe you wouldn’t come back! And I’d have to figure out how to make the food, but despite my plucky earnestness and can-do attitude, I would probably really suck and I’d get yelled at. But no one came by and now I’ve got some really crazy stuff on my Insta story. So...all good!”
“Listen, thanks again,” Yuuri moved aside as the perky fellow climbed down out of the cart to make room for its owner. “I really appreciate it, that could have gotten bad. Um...what’s your name?
“Oh, it’s Phichit! No worries, I’m happy to help. I still get a meal out of it, right?”
“Yeah, absolutely!” Yuuri climbed back up into his metal prison and started getting to work on it.
“Try to make it sexy looking, huh? I want to put it on the grams.”
“Oh, uhhhh...sure thing. Um, are you cool with soft eggs?”
“The runnier the better!”
It took deep control for Yuuri not to whisper “bless you”, and with a determined face he set out to make the sexiest bowl of katsudon possible with the means he had available to him. Surprisingly, without a line of hungry customers, things turned out better than he expected. When he constructed the takeout bowl with the perfectly fried, crispy pork artfully arranged and covered with runny egg and lightly caramelized onions, even he was impressed with himself.
It was almost Mama Katsuki quality.
“Here, please enjoy!” He handed off his baby through the window delicately without putting a lid on it to avoid steam. It was received with a big smile from Phichit, at the ready with his phone camera open.
“This looks amazing ,” Phichit said, eyes wide and honest in a way that made Yuuri’s heart hurt the same way his Thursday night Skype sessions with his mom did. Putting it down on the running board just below the window, Phichit snapped a few artistically staged shots before covering the takeout bowl with the lid he was handed. He smiled up at Yuuri. “Thanks again for the free lunch!”
“Thanks again for helping me out,” Yuuri replied, offering his own honest smile back. He passed over a bag and some chopsticks and extra napkins and Phichit gathered up his things, waving as he left.
Yuuri waved back and felt a pang of loneliness at his departure. Their brief exchange had really felt like a glimmer of friendship in the cold, performative service of his daily grind.
The smiling face popped back into the window, startling him. “I totally forgot to ask your name!”
“O-oh! It’s, uh, Yuuri. Yuuri Katsuki.”
“Yuuri KATSUki owns a KATSUdon cart? Are you for real?” Phichi laughed good naturedly, and Yuuri’s anxious heart was put at ease.
“No joke. That is my name,” he replied with a shy smile, pushing his glasses up on the bridge of his nose.
“Welp, I’m definitely making this my new lunch spot when I’m in the area. I’ll see you again, okay?”
“Definitely!”
When Yuuri went home that night, he thought fondly about his new, smiling friend.
Over the next couple of weeks, Phichit’s sunny face graced his window a few times and Yuuri noticed an uptick in customers that he profiled as students. When he brought it up, Phichit had cheerfully told him that he had promo’d his cart on his social media accounts—apparently, the Thai-born fashionista had gathered a modest local following of NYC art students and hipsters ever since he’d started his degree at Parsons.
Yuuri wasn’t going to complain; he was fully aware of the impact of social media on sales, and he was also fully aware that he was horrible at social media. Giving Phichit a few free Ramune with his lunches in exchange for some expertly hashtagged free advertisements wasn’t a deal that he was going to sniff at. He also found that students were typically less annoying than the older business crowd: they were less fussy and more adventurous eaters, and most of them were fairly in touch with Japanese culture because they all grew up watching the same anime he had back home. Exchanging Shokugeki no Soma references with students made his day less stressful than dealing with vaguely racist comments from older white guys that wandered over from the bank.
Towards the end of the dinner rush, two of the aforementioned suits walked off with their bags in hand grumbling about the price hikes of roach coach meals. Trying to squash down the tension headache he was developing, Yuuri almost didn’t notice a head of blonde hair standing in front of his window.
“HEY.”
Yuuri blinked and leaned forward to look, his glasses slipping down his nose, damp with sweat. At the same time, intense green eyes bounced up as the customer rocked up on his toes to see through the window. “Hello, can I get an order or what? You closed??”
The Russian accent took a moment to parse, but Yuuri shook his head. “No, still open! What can I get you?”
“You only have one thing on menu,” the kid griped. He was a kid right? Yuuri had trouble guessing ages, some of these students came around with faces like tweens drinking cans of PBR “subtly” hidden in brown paper bags.
“So...one then?”
“Yeah, and Coke.” The shorty smacked a twenty down in the window and Yuuri dropped a cutlet into the fryer before making change for him. He washed his hands and delivered up the order in a few minutes, wishing the boy a pleasant evening and watching him walk off. A bit of a line had built up, so he didn’t have time to dwell on it. It wasn’t until he noticed that the boy was back and hovering just a few yards away from the cart that the warning bells started going off.
At first he thought there’d been a mistake with the order. He’d gotten more than a few customers that came back asking for a refund because they simply didn’t like the dish. That was...whatever. He couldn’t really fault people their taste buds (but also, come on, you know if you like pork, egg, onions, and rice). But the blonde never came back around to ask for his money back. He just stood over near Cube-kun, scowling in Yuuri’s direction. It was thoroughly spiking the paranoia gauge on his weird-shit-o-meter.
This was gonna be bad. He’d been tricked by baby-faced plainclothes cops before. He still owed Takeshi about a grand from the last time he’d been snagged on a parking technicality that came out of nowhere and sent him into a death spiral panic attack in the middle of lunch rush. At least it’s almost the end of the day, he thought to himself. I can meltdown properly on the train home. He’d try to grab an end seat near the door between cars so that he could properly curl up into a ball and cry against the little window while other commuters pretended not to notice.
He ran out of pork around 6, which was happening more frequently, and he ticked a mental note to revise his purchasing orders. Shutting his window he began to tidy while waiting for his cart to be picked up by the garage. After a moment, there was a sharp knock on the glass.
“Sorry, I’m sold out!”
“Let’s have little chat, huh?”
Yuuri peeked out the window to see the blonde kid staring straight at him with a scowl he hadn’t seen the likeness of since he asked a Midtown barista what a cortado was. “Uh-Uhm...come around to the side door.”
Stepping down onto the sidewalk, it felt about fifteen degrees cooler in the summer evening heat outside the confines of the steel sauna he spent most of his day in, but Yuuri was sweating for entirely different reasons. The Russian punk stood in his way, arms crossed, and Yuuri wiped a slick of sweat from his forehead that made his sleeve damp.
“Pretty sure...I’m parked exactly six inches away from the curb…” Yuuri started, still not quite certain he wasn’t dealing with NYPD. Was this chibi about to pull out a ruler?
“I’m not a fuckin’ cop,” the blonde clicked his tongue and shoved his hands deep in the pockets of his hoodie. His eyes narrowed and he looked around furtively. “How much money you make today?”
Yuuri paled, his toes curling in his sneakers as he leaned back defensively. He’d made a good amount, the bills currently tucked in the pocket of his apron in a nice fat stack that he now realized was an easy target. The kid was short, but his arms looked like they had some muscle under his red hoodie, and Yuuri steeled his heart to deal with his first ever mugging. He stood up a little straighter, sticking out his chin and trying to find some courage even though his knees were feeling wobbly. “Enough. Why?”
“Jeez, don’t get tough. You had lines for a while. Food was pretty good. You know how to do other Japanese stuff or just that one dish?”
“Uhhhh, no, I can make….other...stuff,” Yuuri’s anxiety was melting into confusion at the odd line of questioning from the odd young man. He pushed up his glasses nervously. “I just like making katsudon.”
“Huh.” The blonde sized him up for a moment. “I hear your name is Yuri too. Same for me, but like...Russian, not Japanese.” He puffed up his chest and paused for another moment, kicking his booted toe against the sidewalk while Yuuri digested this information. When the elder of the pair didn’t seem to have a suitable response, the younger continued. “You wan’ get drinks with me? I have a business proposition.”
Yuuri’s eyebrows raised, his mother’s outlandish warnings ringing in his ears. “...are you with the Russian mob?”
The boy chuckled, looking too chuffed as he crossed his arms and smirked, jutting out his jaw aggressively. “Maybe.”
Yuuri was 99% sure this kid had nothing to do with the Russian mob.