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Tooru’s just about to shut the door when the last two students tumble in, hair flyaway and cheeks flushed in a way that does them no favours. It’s not as though it’s the first time these two have been late—he’s seen the reasons why, and he has never gone back to that particular restroom since—but one has a cup of coffee in hand and the other has the remnants of crumbs around his lips. A late breakfast, then, and not clandestine activities that shouldn’t be performed in a cubicle.
Though there’s always the possibility they were, a voice in the back of Tooru’s mind whispers—but did he ask to see his students in compromising positions? Does he want to imagine Hinata shoving his tongue down Nishinoya’s throat at a wonderfully bright nine-oh-five in the morning?
After spending approximately one second looking deep into his soul, Tooru realizes that—no, he really does not. “Chibi-chan, I know we can’t all be perfect like me,” he addresses Hinata first, “but if you get poisoned because you licked paint and crumbs off your cheek? I will not be approving your absence in my class.
“Same goes with you and drinking coffee in my class, Nishinoya-kun,” Tooru breezily adds over Hinata’s half-indignant and half-embarrassed squawk, “so do find the time to eat breakfast earlier, unless you want to get locked out regardless.”
Nishinoya’s eyes flare with anger, but he only nods his head jerkily and tugs Hinata to his seat before either of them can lose their temper. Pity, really—maybe Tooru’s losing his touch, or his precious little students are getting accustomed to his flippant comments. Probably the latter, he decides, and leaves them to scramble to the back and make themselves more presentable while he strides to the front.
“Now that everyone’s here,” Tooru chirps with a clap of his hands, effectively gaining everyone’s attention for the start of their class, “let’s run over the lesson plan today, hm?”
And as people surreptitiously tuck their phones away and take out their sketchbooks with varying levels of enthusiasm, Tooru launches into the mini-lecture he always does before practical lessons.
It’s all the usual self-evident things that his art students almost never keep in mind—depth and lighting, proportions and style, and Tooru’s well aware that most of them are tuning him out. Whilst that’s an affront to his professionalism, because it’s not like he enjoys nattering on about the most basic of things to legal adults with pea-sized brains, it also covers his ass when they inevitably, pitifully fail.
He’d say hilariously, but there’s nothing hilarious about any of the ways his students have butchered those poor, poor models. Tooru would know—having to stand in as a model in other classes was both tedious and incredibly frustrating, not in the least because none of them ever captured his true beauty, and this batch have less talent for realistic art than his pinkie finger. Honestly, why he’s been relegated to teaching of-age amateurs when he’s the most qualified art teacher in the college escapes him.
But needs must, and it’s not long before he’s wrapping up his general pointers for their sitting today. There’s a few glazed eyes—they’ll probably draw something barely passable—and Tooru has to hold his tongue so he won’t ask them pointed questions about what he’s said in the past ten minutes.
Maybe they’ll actually do their first model sitting justice. Tooru doubts it, but it’s still a nice thought to hold onto.
“And now for the moment you’ve all been waiting for,” Tooru says with another clap of his hands, snapping some students out of their daze and making a handful of others jolt in their seats. A few of them, at least, look gratifyingly interested—which they should be, because Tooru picked the perfect model for them.
Well, beyond his horrible mouth and gorilla-like tendencies, Tooru admits to himself, and raises his voice to trill, “Please welcome your model for today—Iwa-chan!”
The person that steps through the door is not his horrible excuse of a childhood friend, though. He doesn’t have thick biceps barely contained in pitiful cotton sleeves or powerful calves pressing against his jeans, or that wonderfully idiotic scowl disfiguring his passably decent face.
“Suga-san?” someone—Nishinoya—calls from the back, and the slender, grey-haired beauty offers him a wave and a smile.
“You’re… not Iwa-chan,” Tooru points out rather (un)helpfully, and the stranger turns to direct his smile at Tooru instead.
His smile’s brighter than Hinata’s blinding grins—perhaps even brighter than most of Tooru’s smiles, and that’s saying something. How someone can look this genuinely chipper in the morning is a mystery to Tooru, for all that he’d swear up and down that he’s both a night owl and an early bird, and he’s fairly certain he can hear someone in his class swooning over Suga.
Because of course his name is the English equivalent for sugar. Of course he’s cute and attractive in a way that Iwa-chan, with his deplorable swearing and near-constant resting bitch face, is not.
It takes him an embarrassingly long time to realize that Suga’s holding a hand out to him, all smiles and good cheer and oh my god, that’s a beauty mark on his cheek as he says, “I’m so sorry for the inconvenience, but Iwaizumi-san wasn’t able to make it today. I’m Sugawara Koushi, and I’ll be helping with your modelling class today.”
It takes him even longer to softly clear his throat, plaster on a smile that does nothing to hide the faint flush he can feel on his face and shake Suga’s—Sugawara’s—hand while saying, “Oh, that’s no problem at all! Though, you know, I wasn’t aware a Neanderthal like Iwa-chan would know someone like you.”
“Someone like me?” Sugawara asks. His eyebrow might be raised, but that’s definitely amusement alight in his eyes.
Tooru absolutely has a charming and witty comeback prepared and on the tip of his tongue—but then someone whispers just a little too loudly, “Oh my god, are we going to draw Sugawara-san nude?” and the moment’s completely ruined.
“Chibi-chan,” Tooru says without looking away from Sugawara—or letting go of his hand, even though he really should. “If you are that unsatisfied with your private life that you’d want to ogle our model’s body so shamelessly, then I’m going to make you draw the medical department’s cadavers instead.”
“Dead bodies,” a lanky student two seats away from Hinata offers, when Tooru hears him make a confused and strangely crow-like noise—
But then Hinata’s shrieking and Nishinoya’s falling out of his chair and someone from next door’s class is banging on the wall with an aggrieved yell, muffled words barely audible above Hinata’s ear-splitting scream. It’s honestly so stupid because, really, they’d been drawing apples and perfectly preserved animal skulls just yesterday, so why was a perfectly preserved human body so terrifying?
“Chibi-chan!” Tooru yells—no, projects his voice, because he doesn’t do anything as childish as yell—over the cacophony that’s started up. “Chibi-chan, please—”
“Hinata,” a perfectly warm and level voice says in a sudden lull, “I’m sure your teacher was joking. But if you continue screaming like that, then you might get kicked out of class, and that would be—”
“Really bad, Shouyou—so let’s sit up and get back to the lesson, yeah?” Nishinoya clambers up from where he’s half-collapsed on the floor and kisses Hinata on the forehead—which, ugh, PDA much?—but it seems to do the trick, and Hinata draws in a deep breath before he smiles wanly at Nishinoya.
Tooru might’ve pegged some of the other students as the hysterical sort—like Yachi, who even now is trembling a little and sweating all too noticeably in her seat—but Hinata? Just because he mentioned drawing a dead body?
They’re not thoughts he’s meant to have now, though, not with a class that’s already a few minutes off-schedule and Sugawara standing politely but pointedly by his side. He’ll probably pull Hinata aside later, and—not apologize, because he didn’t do anything wrong, but maybe just… tell him that dead bodies weren’t on the curriculum.
And neither are nudes of Refreshing-kun.
“I’ll stand over there then?” Sugawara interjects, pointing over to the platform in the middle of the room, and Tooru has to clear his throat again before he nods in response.
When Sugawara doesn’t immediately begin heading over to settle into a pose, Tooru finds himself glancing over with an arched brow, but—
“I think,” Sugawara says in what’s definitely an amused voice, “you have to let go of my hand first, before I get started.”
Tooru had never let go of someone faster… but even as a few students snicker, even as Sugawara flashes him another smile and waves at Nishinoya and Hinata as he makes his way to the platform, he can’t really find it in himself to feel annoyed or embarrassed.
Sugawara Koushi, huh? Tooru finds himself thinking instead, in between a few last-minute instructions and the clatter of pencils and paintbrushes as his class get to work. How… refreshing, indeed.
“So tell me Trashykawa isn’t the most awful fucking person on the planet,” Iwaizumi states without preamble, nodding to Daichi before he turns his attention to Koushi. “Go on, I’m waiting.”
“He’s certainly not the best person in the world,” Koushi admits, “but…”
“But?” Iwaizumi asks, eyebrows raised in clear irritation.
Koushi thinks of the perfectly coiffed art teacher that’d flushed as he’d extended his hand to him—the wildly inappropriate nicknames for his students, the bright shallowness in his smiles and the casual threat he’d mindlessly scared Hinata with in class. Iwaizumi’s always going on about his horrible excuse of a childhood friend, even if the twist of his mouth isn’t angry so much as it’s amusedly resigned most times, and…
“Well,” Koushi eventually concludes, “I think I might need to meet him again to form a more solid opinion.”
“Be my guest,” is Iwaizumi’s prompt reply, and Koushi has to keep his grin to something warmer and friendlier—just so he won’t pick up on the excitement underpinning his next meeting with Oikawa Tooru.