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In retrospect, accepting that liquid abomination, about which Oikawa had said, “This is the nectar of the gods, Kei-chan, you’ll love it,” (and he’d been partly correct, as it did taste like the piss of Cthulhu, the demon squid king himself), had been a terrible mistake. He should have known better than to drink the alarmingly green concoction after an irate Iwaizumi yanked Oikawa out from behind the bar by his hair and yelled, “You’re not the bartender!” and Oikawa wouldn’t stop giggling even though his hairdo was being mercilessly disfigured. Naïvely, maybe, Kei had still sucked the entire drink down in one go (and tried valiantly, really, not to gag it all back up immediately). He wouldn’t give Oikawa the satisfaction.
Now he’s absolutely, irreversibly, paradigm-shiftingly sloshed, though his brain-to-mouth filter is still intact. You might think that this is a good thing, and a large part of Kei agrees. He cares about what he says very deeply. However, the little corner of his consciousness that still has some modicum of comprehension of his usual image is positively horrified. You see, nothing has really changed since this alteration of his sobriety: he will only speak words that deserve to be spoken, that offer some sort of witty, barbed insight, that sound cool.
Only carefully curated collections of words cross through his mouth and out into the air where everyone can hear. Yes, this holds true when Kei is drunk. But, you see, everything has changed after imbibing so much highly concentrated alcohol so quickly. A great many words, so so many more words than normal, seem to meet these standards now and Kei thinks the entire world, or at least everyone at this party, deserves to hear them.
He’s standing on a table, towering over all of the other party guests. Someone (probably Tetsu, that shameless enabler), has turned the music way down so that everyone can listen to him talk. Listen to him talk about what, you might ask?
Well, as with probably 40% of the things that derail Kei’s very existence, it all goes back to Hinata and Kageyama. Those two gormless buffoons had had the audacity (the audacity of the incredibly ignorant) to talk about the supposed glory of the new Jurassic World movies just a couple feet away from him. That, right there, had been enough to make Kei’s hands clench into fists.
Kei had scoffed.
Hinata looked up from fiddling with Kageyama’s bow tie and exclaimed, eyes wide and innocent, “Tsukki, I thought you’d love those movies!”
Kei did not even merit that ridiculous assumption with a response; he just patted them each on the shoulder (doing his best not to “tch” at them) and walked back towards his table.
Ugh, he really should have seen all of this coming. He should have known; there were so many red flags. You see, as with about 40% of the chaos in Kei’s life, his current predicament is the direct result of the machinations of one Oikawa Tooru.
In retrospect, Oikawa proffering the drink he’d made to Kei, Kei of all people, was probably not a coincidence. Oikawa only giggles maniacally like that when he’s won something. No, that verdant drink was not a spur-of-the-moment gift sourced from some mix of Oikawa’s generosity and his creative bartending capabilities. Oikawa made that drink and gave it to Kei pointedly. Furthermore, Oikawa probably even implanted the idea in Hinata and Kageyama’s few collective brain cells to try and talk about Jurassic World with him, that devil. He’d very likely, almost certainly been plotting this whole ordeal for a long time, probably ever since the department holiday party...
It had been right after the end of the fall semester. Kei was done with finals, done with some preliminary experiments that would determine the path for his next year’s worth of thesis research. He was relaxed and happy for the first time in months, so of course he’d indulged in a few drinks. He was having a ball, talking with the other first year grad students about everything and anything but their studies. It was great: he was laughing and they all were having a highly entertaining but still rather intellectual discussion. Kei couldn’t think of a place he’d rather be in that moment.
And then, and then, two arms had draped over his shoulders and a lilting voice had sung “Kei-chan~” in his ear.
You see, somehow he had become friends with Oikawa over the course of his first semester in grad school. Oikawa and Kei got lunch together once a week (something that had initially been entirely forced by Oikawa until Kei found himself enjoying their weekly chats and suggesting new bakeries with interesting pastries for Oikawa to try). It was actually really nice to find someone who shared Kei’s passion for life forms that weren’t currently present on the surface of the earth.
But, at the party, in Kei’s slightly tipsy state of mind, all he could say was, “Oikawa, you should tell everyone that theory you told me last week.”
There may have been a bit of miscommunication in that moment. Kei and his fellow first years were talking about funny things, but Oikawa didn’t know that, and Kei hadn’t thought to tell him. All he could think of was how stupendously hilarious Oikawa’s theory was.
Now, Oikawa is definitely well respected within their department. He’s a dedicated researcher and his dissertation is pretty groundbreaking. He’s a boon to his lab, to the department in general. The first years all look up to him, even Kei. When Oikawa talks about his actual research, he’s used to the first years enthusiastically asking questions and looking at him with stars in their eyes.
Ironically, Oikawa’s also usually quite happy to joke about the crazies that tend to plague his field and their utterly insane/impossible conspiracies. Hell, Oikawa even likes to pretend that he believes those sometimes just to screw with his peers. Kei will never forget the time that Oikawa queued up a 50-slide fake powerpoint that he made about an interview with a supposed alien abductee during a symposium practice round. He even gave the first five minutes of that presentation before breaking into uncontrollable fits of giggles (and only then giving his actual presentation). Legendary.
However, on that fateful evening, Oikawa didn’t think his theory was something funny. No, he had a cork board in his house devoted to it, full on Pepe Silvia devoted (Kei’s seen it), and for some reason, he wouldn’t hear reason about it. Kei wasn’t really surprised though; he had chalked it up to Oikawa being chaotic.
And lastly, Oikawa is in the astrobiology lab. Astrobiology people work with molecular things, with really really early life fossils, and with planetary geology data. They do not often work with dinosaurs. Most of the first year grad students, Kei included, are in paleontology/evolutionary biology/climate history labs. In short, most of them actually do think about dinosaurs a lot. So, when everyone laughed at Oikawa’s theory (because they thought it was just as insanely ridiculous as Kei had the first time he heard it), going so far as to slap their knees and wipe tears from the corners of their eyes, Oikawa had not been prepared. No, he must have been extremely offended, utterly wrathful, and immediately ready to seek vengeance. But, being the passive aggressive psycho and total master of hiding his emotions that Oikawa is, all Kei had seen was a flash of rage quickly (so quickly that Kei thought he might have imagined it) replaced with good humor and a bright smile, which remained on Oikawa’s face for the rest of the night. Kei had thought ‘well, it’s good that he’s finally seen sense, seen what some other paleo people think’ and nothing more.
It had been a grave error, a huge miscalculation on his part.
Because, here he was, totally fucking smashed, about to go on an equally ridiculous rant (given the setting and the people he’s addressing). Like Oikawa before him, Kei thinks the things he’s going to talk about are of the utmost importance and the public must know the truth. But, unlike Oikawa, the things he is going to talk about actually are real and important, and (hopefully) no one will think he’s crazy.
So, really, what is he on the verge of ranting about?
Well, like with the other 20% of things that knock Kei completely off his traintracks, Kuroo Tetsurou is inextricably involved.
You see, Tetsu knows Kei, knows when something’s bothering him. So, as Kei tried not sulk all the way through dinner (what can he say, he was already a little tipsy, so of course his mind wouldn’t let it go) as he fixated on how anyone could think Jurassic World was a worthwhile cinematic experience, Tetsu was watching and thinking.
He also watched as Oikawa, sounding as sweet and innocent as ever (curse that bastard’s ability to veil everything happening inside his head with his carefree tone), asked from across their table, “Something bothering you, Kei-chan?”
It is absolutely relevant to mention that Tetsu thinks Kei’s and Oikawa’s bickering is hilarious and that he always does all he can to encourage it. So, when Oikawa asked this question, Tetsu turned towards Kei and asked, suspiciously beseechingly, “Yeah, won’t you tell us what’s on your mind?”
Kei was not drunk enough for that yet, so he left it at “Hinata and Kageyama are their usual idiot selves. Nothing’s changed since we all met.”
As everyone laughed, Tetsu, equally suspiciously, didn’t push him further. He merely raised his glass and said, smirking, “Well, cheers to those idiots!” Everyone toasted with smiles on their faces (even Kei, just the littlest bit).
In retrospect, Tetsu must have resolved to aid Oikawa with his plotting during this flurry of clinking glassware. Tetsu had been the one who suggested they get more drinks an hour later after they’d been dancing for some time. Kei, tipsy as he already was and slightly high on dancing-induced endorphins (and in amazing spirits after watching Hinata try to lead Kageyama, the worst dancer in the history of dancing, in their first dance), heartily agreed.
And then there was Oikawa, offering him that neon green mixy-from-hell, and there was Tetsu, grinning and telling him he couldn’t let Oikawa get one over on him. So he drank it…
He doesn’t really remember what happened after that, or immediately before this moment.
But now here’s Tetsu, helping Kei up onto the table and turning down the music and there’s a once-again maniacally giggling Oikawa (tailed by a suspicious Iwaizumi) shepherding everyone towards Kei.
Oikawa trills, “Everyone, our beloved Tsukishima Kei has something he would like to say. It involves his favorite conversational topics, the men of the hour,” he points to Hinata and Kageyama, who look rather ruffled (knowing Oikawa, he probably dragged them away from a quick makeout session in the bathroom), “and dinosaurs. ” He motions to Kei to take it away.
Yes, the world must know the truth, must end their ignorance and be privy to everything that is wrong with Jurassic World. These words deserve to be heard. Kei’s not embarrassed, not like Oikawa thinks he will be.
In a sense, he’s just continuing the job he did during his short tenure as Hinata and Kageyama’s tutor. Kei inhales deeply.
“Yes drunk Tsukki! Go off!” Yells Yamaguchi (! traitor!).
“Shhhh- shut it, Yamaguchi,” he slurs.
“Sorry Tsukki,” he says, not sorry in the slightest. Everyone laughs, even the parents.
Kei inhales deeply once more, and finally, finally releases what he’s been holding in since the start of the evening. “Hinata and Kag-, actually, you’re Hinata-Kageyama and Hinata-Kageyama now, addressing you both is going to be such a mouthful…” (If he’s throwing in all of his two cents, he might as well say he thinks hyphenating is ridiculous. People should just amalgamate their names into something new. It’d be so much more fun and so much shorter. But that’s neither here nor there, as far as dinosaurs go.) “Y’all are ridiculous. Just, just unbelievably ridiculous.” He laughs. “But this takes the cake. Jurassic World? Just no. No! As a paleontologist, I cannot condone any support of this movie.”
Kei looks around the room, meeting everyone’s eyes, daring them to challenge him. Hinata-Kageyama Shouyou has his face pressed into Hinata-Kageyama Tobio’s shoulder, probably because of embarrassment (and definitely not to stifle laughter). He sees Tetsu, laughing and looking proud, and Oikawa, looking devious and triumphant and excited. He smiles at them both.
“Let me start by addressing the whole lack of feathers deal. We’ve known for decades that dinosaurs were feathered. In fact, we’ve known for a while that all dinosaurs probably had some sort of feathery coating. It’s absolutely despicable that no dinosaurs in Jurassic World have feathers. I can forgive the original Jurassic Park, which is one of my favorite movies, I might add, for having non-feathered dinosaurs. It wasn’t a well established truth at the time of its release. But, Jurassic World besmirches the good name of it’s predecessor by ignoring science! The first Jurassic Park was actually a fairly accurate glimpse into the paleontological process, aside from all of the DNA stuff. That’s all bogus, but it was at least a fun plot.
“No! In Jurassic World, they’ve got totally featherless, wrinkly, scaly beasts! Ugh. Horrifying. And don’t even get me started on the ‘Velociraptors,’” (he makes air quotes with his fingers), “which are nothing like what they should be! An actual Velociraptor was about the size of a turkey. No, something closer to the size in the things in the movie would be Deinonychus, and they would not be coordinated pack hunters. No, we find fossils of groups of them with prey and they all have scratches in their bones too… So they feeding frenzied each other! They didn’t hunt like wolves. No, they do what birds today do and go nuts and attack each other in the process. I will say, though, that the whole ‘clever girl’ thing was funny. Good on you, Chris Pratt.
“And godless worms, InDoMiNuS rEx my ass! That’s some more insane genetics stuff than what was in the original movie. I can’t even bring myself to think about it right now.” He closes his eyes and squeezes the bridge of his nose with his fingers.
“And I can’t forget the monster mosasaur, which isn’t technically a dinosaur, but still worthy of mention. The thing was like 100 meters long in the movie, but in reality it’s more like 30 feet… That exaggeration is almost as ridiculous as Godzilla-”
“Dude, don’t bring Godzilla into this!” Says Iwaizumi, forever the champion of his favorite franchise.
“Iwa-chan,” oh fuck, did he just say that out loud? He hangs out with Oikawa way too much.
Oikawa screeches in delight and Iwaizumi’s jaw hits the floor.
“Iwa-chan.” (Fuck, whatever, Kei doesn’t care how he addresses him anymore, all he knows is that he’s drunk and needs to dispel all of the dinosaur-based falsehoods in the major sci-fi franchises.) “Godzilla is great and I love the movies myself. But, but, that does nothing to change the fact that Godzilla himself is modeled on Stegosaurus! That’s fucking hilarious. Walnut brained idiots, those were. And herbivores.” Kei chortles.
Iwaizumi chokes on his rage, which makes Kei laugh even harder. Oikawa squeals with joy.
“Don’t get too happy, Trashykawa!” (He figures it’s only fair to borrow from Iwaizumi’s name catalogue in turn.) “Don’t think I won’t debunk your precious theory here too!”
“Oya? Oya oya? Let’s hear both of your arguments.” Tetsu says, grinning widely. Kei knows this confrontation is exactly what he’s been waiting for since that moment during dinner.
“There’s nothing to debunk, Kei-chan!” Oikawa shouts. “My theory is spot on, and you and your paleontologist friends are blinded to the truth by your preconceived notions!”
Kei bets that Oikawa thinks that the non-scientists gathered here today will be easier to convince than Kei and his fellow paleontologists, that he can verbally outmaneuver a really drunk Kei.
Okay, Tetsurou. For Tetsu, Kei’ll get into this with Tooru at two of his oldest friends’ wedding.
Kei laughs wickedly. He feels like Godzilla, about to topple the Tokyo Tower. No, the Tooru-kyo Tower. Hah. Regardless of the Jurassic-age herbivorous dumbo that served as its inspiration, canonical Gozilla is strong.
“Prenc-preconceived notions? Don’t you mean our literal research? Tooru, I study theropods. I don’t know what you expect from this.”
“Kei-chan! How can I not be right about this! You’ve seen the evidence!”
“Your crazy corkboard and showing me a street pigeon are not actual, rigorously tested science! My thesis, however, is.” He takes a breath. “Theropods were not seeded by aliens. Just because it’s hard to resolve the relationship between sauropods, theropods, and ornithischians, we cannot just say that theropods were thrown in by aliens! We can see very clearly in the genetics of birds, which are literally living theropod dinosaurs, that they’re all descended from the same weird microorganisms of the Proterozoic as every other living thing on earth! We can also see plenty of shared characters across the groups-”
“But! But the way their heads twitch! They move so fast! How can they be anything other than alien! You’ve watched the pigeons-”
“Tooru-” Poor Iwaizumi, lol.
“-and owls! They can spin their heads around 180 degrees; that’s so freaky!”
“Hey! Don’t bring owls into this!” Yells Bokuto indignantly. Akaashi pats his shoulder.
“Birds aren’t alien spies. They don’t have secret transmission systems to communicate with aliens; that’s just absurd.”
“Then why do penguins make their little rock nests, hmmm? To communicate with aliens! They only pick rocks that they can pile into sensible messages. And crows! They pick up random stuff and leave it for humans because they’re trying to communicate with us on behalf of the aliens!”
“Read a bird behaviour book! Those are mating displays or enjoyment of shiny things, all of them.”
“That’s what they want you to think.”
“Tooru, you are ‘they.’ You’re literally a scientist.”
“Yes, so you should respect my thoughts!”
“I’ll respect them when you show me actual supporting science! Which is impossible: I’ve definitively disproved this all many times over.”
“Neeehhh!”
“Go back to your microbial life on Enceladus! Your real science. It’s so ridiculously cool; I don’t understand why you’re so caught up with this nonsense.”
“But they’re so far away… I’ll never see them in real life! Birds are here!”
“You’re grasping at straws.”
“Am not!”
“Asskawa! Stop being unsatisfied by all the amazing work that you do and appreciate yourself! You’re incredible even without this crazy conspiracy theory!” Iwaizumi says, and then immediately headbutts Oikawa in the chest.
Oikawa looks stunned as he gazes into Iwaizumi’s eyes.
“Yeah, you dunce. What he said.” Kei seconds.
Oikawa bursts into tears and hugs Iwaizumi before box-jumping onto Kei’s table. As Kei struggles to puzzle out what’s happening, Oikawa’s squeezes him and cries into his chest and says, “I love you too, Kei-chan, I can’t believe you think that about me, that means so much coming from you, you’re wonderful too~”
Kei pats Oikawa’s hair and says, quietly, “Of course I think that. I choose to get lunch with you every week and listen to you talk about your microbes, right?” Wow, when did Kei get so soft? Well, he guesses, when your close friend’s actually really insecure about something, it’s best to tell them the truth, even if it’s much mushier than anything Kei’d normally say. Oikawa deserves to hear it. “As ridiculous as the alien-bird theory is, I’m sorry for upsetting you when the other first years and I laughed at it a while back. We all really admire you a lot. I’m not sorry for debunking it, though, because it’s crazy. But you don’t need to be right about everything for us to think you’re great.”
Oikawa smiles genuinely and tearfully. He squeezes Kei one more time (and Kei finally wraps his arms lightly around Oikawa’s shoulders and squeezes back, just a bit), before letting go and jumping back down to the ground. He then flings himself into Iwaizumi’s arms and they walk off somewhere, whispering in each other’s ears.
Normally, Kei’d probably be overwhelmed and uncomfortable in the presence of such gratuitous PDA, but in his drunken mindset, all he can think is that he wants the same.
He tries to leave the table as gracefully as Oikawa had, but his feet are quite unsteady and he sort of topples over like a baby deer trying to walk for the first time. Luckily, Yamaguchi and Tetsu are waiting and catch him before his face hits the floor. It couldn’t have worked out any better, to be honest. Kei pats Yamaguchi’s head much like he patted Oikawa’s a minute prior and leans his face against Tetsu’s shoulder.
“Well, folks, that was the acclaimed Tsukishima Kei, graduate student and expert on dinosaur-related inaccuracies. Thank you for listening to his Ted Talk.” Tetsu winks at the crowd and he and Yamaguchi haul Kei back to their seats. Yamaguchi smiles at Kei, which makes Kei giggle and cling more tightly to Tetsu. Goodness, he definitely hangs out with Oikawa far too much. The tiny, sober corner of Kei’s consciousness sighs in defeat and accepts the warm comfort of Tetsu’s arms.
“That was glorious.” Tetsu ruffles his hair and presses a quick kiss to his cheek. “You destroyed Oikawa, but you also managed to renew his self-confidence... By calling him a dunce, of all things. You’re something else, Kei.”
“I have good people in my life who encourage me to do good things.” He says, and it’s true. Kei loves them all.