Work Text:
You felt like heaven stood up in you, you said love fills you up.
To illustrate the minor problem that is currently plaguing Starfleet, it is perhaps best to look at the case of the chocolates.
It starts with Hinata’s message on the fleet channel—how he gets away with shit like this, Kiyoomi has no idea—which goes as follows:
From: Hinata, Shouyou <[email protected]>
To: [ALL CREW]
Subject: Fridge raiding
Guys, who took the last Godiva truffle from the Anubis’s communal refrigeration unit? I was saving that. Not cool. The box had my name on it and the replicator can’t make that stuff.
Commander Shouyou Hinata
Chief Engineering Officer
USS Anubis (NCC-3869-A)
Of course no one owns up to it. Nobody is looking forward to being repeatedly pummelled into the gym floor by Chief Security Officer Miya with a cheery remark of well, everyone’s gotta know how to take a beating and get up again! So Hinata has to spend the next few days moping about his chocolate to anyone who will listen—Kiyoomi doesn’t blame him, they’ve spent two months in space, and it had been good chocolate.
Miya, naturally, is eager to nod commiseratingly and make soothing sounds. Bokuto attempts to make truffles in the replicator, which does not turn out well for his or anyone else’s stomachs. His poor test subject and infinitely patient husband, Dr. Akaashi, comes to the sick bay refusing to meet Kiyoomi’s eyes.
The shuttle that soon approaches them apparently came all the way here from Earth, where the USS Garuda is currently undergoing repairs, and has been commissioned to reach the USS Anubis just before it goes into warp. Tobio Kageyama has sent a shipment of Godiva chocolates in a box so big Hinata has to stand on his tiptoes to be as tall as it.
The shuttle’s timing is fortuitous; it’s a particularly slow day, so about a quarter of the ship gets to watch Miya scan the shipment and announce that it is a humongous box of chocolates, not a biological weapon or some kind of bomb. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief. Kiyoomi, who knows that—much like the biblical plagues—this is only a sign of things to come, sighs with the opposite of relief.
They are apparently cursed enough to dock at the same space station as the USS Bluecastle right after they bounce out of their first warp, so Kiyoomi comes to the mess hall one day to see a large, life-sized statue of said ship’s captain being pushed near the tables. Chocolate Tooru Oikawa looks just as smug as the real thing.
Having determined that this monstrosity is more perishable than the truffles lined up in the ship’s storage, Hinata has magnanimously decided that everyone can have a piece of Oikawa. In those exact words, with the biggest grin on his face. Sometimes Kiyoomi doesn’t know if Hinata’s as oblivious as he seems or really just a very subtle genius.
“So you haven’t made your contribution to the latest round yet,” Kiyoomi comments when Miya sits next to him for lunch with Oikawa’s entire nose on his tray, next to his pudding.
“Whaddaya mean? I took this off Oikawa’s face. He’s way uglier already.” Miya snickers to himself as he points at Oikawa’s now noseless face. Kiyoomi is tempted to tell him that Oikawa is still hot. “And I’m workin’ with Bokuto to get the recipe right for the replicators. Unlimited Godiva truffles. The others can try to beat that.”
“This is actually a good idea, if you can manage it.”
“If? Yer doubtin’ yer Materials Science lab partner, now?”
If Kiyoomi is forced to answer, he will have to grudgingly admit that the answer is ‘no.’ Miya is the biggest annoyance on the ship but he does have a functioning brain. This ticks Kiyoomi off to no end.
“Doubting Bokuto will stop at truffles, once he gets going.”
Miya laughs. “More for us! I fuckin’ love the Anubis.”
It does, of course, take a while to figure out. Kiyoomi has to suffer unexpected appearances of Miya at the sickbay, scribbling on his PADD and reading physics and chemistry papers out loud. Kiyoomi had never thought of finding out whether listening to the merits of different particle microaccelerators would soothe his patients, but maybe he should start handing out forms to fill.
“Why are you coming to me with this? Isn’t Bokuto supposed to figure this out with you?”
“Bokkun’s busy.” Any child can tell you a ship’s Chief Science Officer is often busy. “Anyway, once a Materials Science lab partner, always a Materials Science lab partner. Right?”
“That’s horrifying,” Kiyoomi says. “Besides,” he adds, hoping he doesn’t have to gesture at the ensign he’s currently sticking a needle into, “unless you’ve developed a spontaneous case of selective blindness, you can see that I’m also very busy at the moment. At any given moment, really. Did you know there are many, many diseases in space? Almost every planet has their own version of the seasonal flu. You seem to still be able to use your eyes to read papers, so you can obviously also see that I have patients. I cannot be discussing replicator recipes with you when I have to be treating them, Miya.”
Miya coughs in a very obviously fake way. “Ah choo,” he says. Says. The onomatopoeia’s vowels are exaggerated in his accent. “Oh, look, Omi-kun, I have the Andalurian flu. Seems nasty. Hear it’s lethal without proper medical treatment.”
Kiyoomi can see that Security is probably having a very, very slow day and unleashing Miya on anyone else would lead to uncontrollably chaotic outcomes. He sighs and decides to take one for the team. “Fine. I’ll go over your theory with you once I’ve taken care of everyone here. Come back later.”
This proves to be a catastrophic decision for Kiyoomi, because he gets invested. It turns out the intersection between how different chocolatiers take care to distinguish their creations from others and how atoms can be manipulated to replicate these differences is endlessly fascinating. Kiyoomi finds his downtime occupied with discussing their little pet project with Miya, old textbooks open, coming up with experimental schemes they submit to Bokuto.
If Kiyoomi catches Miya looking at him once or twice when he’s reading something about excitation states or the chemical composition of chocolate, he looks away quickly and tries to think nothing of it. He is literally helping Miya modify the replicator so he can compete with Shouyou Hinata’s three other insane suitors. That’s all there is to it.
They’re in a rec room, drafting up schematics, when Hinata comes in with Bokuto, holding up his PADD. Both Kiyoomi and Miya hastily change flip away from their screens, but Hinata seems to be rather occupied.
“Kenma, say hi to Omi-san and Atsumu-san!” Hinata flops down next to them. The catlike eyes of Kenma Kozume—founder, majority shareholder, and CEO of the Bouncing Ball intergalactic conglomerate—stare back at them.
“Oh. Hello, Commander Miya, Commander Sakusa.”
“Hello, Mr. Kozume,” Kiyoomi says. Miya squints at Kozume. “How are you?”
“Good,” Kozume answers cordially. The richest sentient being across five star systems is, of course, doing good. “I was just telling Shouyou to open his inbox because I’m sending him something right now, as we speak. And… it’s sent. Check it out.”
Hinata swipes to his inbox. There’s no body or subject in the e-mail, only an attachment. It’s a document the size of the screen with Kozume’s signature on the bottom and a blank spot next to it. Kiyoomi blinks.
“So there’s a plant species on Kaskad that’s considered invasive in most of its regions. Its beans are nearly identical to cocoa beans, but they’re poisonous to Kaskadians. Recently Bouncing Ball closed a deal with a Kaskadian country, so we’ve set up automated plantations there, and we built a new factory complex for Godiva,” Kozume explains as he curls his fingers so he can look at his nails. Kiyoomi blinks again. “That’s the deed for the complex. Sign at the bottom, Shouyou.”
Well, there goes Miya’s unlimited truffles.
“Kenma! That’s awesome!” Bokuto gasps, as all the blood drains from Miya’s face.
Bokuto and Hinata carry on chattering excitedly with Kozume about the care and maintenance of factory complexes and the finer details of Kasadian plant life. Miya is slumped in a chair in front of Kiyoomi, looking like someone had stuck a vacuum cleaner into the door to his soul then turned it up to the highest setting.
“We can still finish the replicator project. It won’t incur shipping costs, at least.”
“Why am I even alive,” Miya says.
A butterfly flaps its wings, and a hurricane starts swirling near the Atlantic. Someone eats Shouyou Hinata’s last remaining chocolate in the fridge, and somehow there is now a new intergalactic supply chain and a technology transfer deal with Kasad. Will wonders ever cease. He gets up and tells them he’ll be in the sick bay if anyone needs him, reminding Bokuto and Hinata to carry Miya there if it looks like he’s still deliberately trying to pass away in the next six hours.
The USS Anubis and its crew are on their way to the Suilezin system with orders to escort the new ambassador to planet Bhanu and bring the incumbent home to Earth. The new ambassador, Hyakuzawa, is a friendly if somewhat quiet man who’s at least twice as big as Hinata and seems to have latched on to the USS Anubis’s Chief Engineering Officer like a diplomat version of Clifford the Big Red Dog. Kiyoomi manages to speak to him a grand total of once and Hyakuzawa goes on about love rocks or something. Diplomats are their own species.
Earth and Bhanu are on very good terms; Kiyoomi, at least, won’t have to worry about treating severe injuries and broken bones and the like. However the situation presents an entirely different problem.
Security is stuck doing routine drills, on account of having nothing to prepare for. Which means Atsumu Miya is bored.
After the first month of implementing increasingly hair-raising fight scenarios in combat training sessions that caused Kiyoomi to put his foot down when he finally noticed the sheer amount of Security officers coming his way (with only minor injuries, but still—they’re in warp, there aren’t supposed to be any injuries), Miya has very little to do but paperwork and make stupid faces in the background of Meian’s calls.
Thus, Miya falls back to the terrible habit he’s had since his cadet days: bothering Kiyoomi whenever he has the time, all while being regrettably attractive.
Kiyoomi and Miya should win an award. Their partnership may not be the most efficient, neither was it the most capable of inspiring good habits in each other, nor was it the most harmonious. It was certainly the most something, though, because no other team in Lab 3A of Materials Science have managed to conjure what seemed to be the pulsating organ of an Eldritch horror.
“Y’know, I was hopin’ that if we left it overnight again just one more time, it’d turn out to be the thing we wanted it to be in the morning. Like bread dough. Or a baby.”
Kiyoomi resisted the urge to ask Miya about his early life experiences.
“Have you ever heard the Einstein quote about insanity, Miya?” said Kiyoomi, even as he prepared to run the exact same tests he’d been running for two weeks. Gingerly, he took a spatula and scraped a little bit of the strange pulsating sludge into several test tubes. It had never attacked him yet, but who knew whether or not it was just waiting, biding its time?
“Har har.”
The results from three days ago and the three days before that were in Miya’s hands. These were paper copies, because Miya said they helped them think better. He took his red pen from its perch on his ear and started drawing lines on the tables. Kiyoomi walked over to see what he was doing. Miya was circling the results of several reagent tests.
“Hey, Omi-omi, when ya run this again, can you try it with Salim’s reagent instead of isoperbycin? And for this test, try tryzintostene instead.”
“What would that achieve?”
Miya hummed. “I wanna test for Karel’s bonds and butonic charge.”
Hell, at this point Miya could tell Kiyoomi to stick the samples in a fruitcake and eat the damn thing and he’d probably do it. If the Cthulhu flesh dessert killed him, that would just be a bonus.
Three hours later, Kiyoomi logged the test results, barely believing his eyes. This report wasn’t unintelligible gibberish. This report was as digestible as a fast food restaurant pamphlet. He printed it and dropped it on the table in front of Miya, who was eating a sandwich.
“You were right,” Kiyoomi said, though it pained him to admit it.
“I know,” Miya said as he chewed. He swallowed. Then he looked up at Kiyoomi, confused. “Wait, what was I right about?”
Kiyoomi pointed at the relevant cells on his tables. Miya’s eyes widened. “Oh, man. What the hell, I was right. Shit, that means if we—”
“—treat it with aqueous diostursonide and—”
“—heat up the precipitate,” Miya continued, as Kiyoomi nodded at him, still in shock, “we’ll have something stronger than Fukunaga and Akaashi’s! Holy shit. Holy shit, Omi-omi, we’re gonna win Dr. Ukai’s entire stock of Pasai mead. Ya wanna open a speakeasy with me?”
Sometimes Kiyoomi wondered just how Miya’s brain worked. Then he took care to remind himself that this was the kind of knowledge no being should be burdened with.
In true Atsumu Miya fashion, he wanted to start drafting the paper right away. Kiyoomi tried to persuade him to start with the abstract first, not wanting to present a whole paper to Ukai only to have it thrown back in his face. Miya had grinned at him, eyes glinting in the noon light, and told Kiyoomi that Ukai wasn’t going to have any choice but let them publish.
“I’ll bet ya anything you want that our material’s gonna be on spaceship hulls within three years, Omi-omi. You game?”
Kiyoomi—who’d spent his entire life in schools for gifted children, with the spectres of neuroticism and caution rattling their chains in each hallway—felt, in that moment, as though he’d just been hit by the shockwave of an explosion.
“We haven’t even tested it yet,” he said, giving nothing away.
This was how Kiyoomi found himself spending the rest of the day with Miya, finagling their tables and charts into something readable. Miya booked Lab 3A for the next day so they could start synthesizing and running additional tests immediately, then flashed Kiyoomi a thumbs-up and a smile that set off an exothermic reaction in his chest.
“Close Combat with Admiral Haiba,” Kiyoomi reminded Miya, “in an hour.”
“Shit, her again? Why the hell are they lettin’ her stay planetside ta terrorize cadets? Doesn’t she have space imperialists to defeat or somethin’? I’m not gonna be her sparring partner this time. I think she moved my spine somewhere it’s not supposed to be.”
Kiyoomi, who was certified to tell him that Admiral Haiba had not, in fact, done that, told Miya that Admiral Haiba had not done that.
“Sure felt like it,” Miya said, always needing to have the last word.
Admiral Haiba’s sparring partner that day turned out to be Taichi Kawanishi, who took being twisted into a pretzel with admirable grace. Then, with all the consideration of the truly very lovely woman she was, Admiral Haiba called Kiyoomi next.
“I know you hate to use the room after a lot of people have been on it,” she whispered to him as he stepped up. Kiyoomi thanked her respectfully. “So? Pick a partner, Cadet Sakusa.”
Kiyoomi decided to run a test.
“I choose Cadet Miya.”
The thing is, no one would expect this of Medical-track Sakusa, boarding-school-boy Sakusa, asleep-at-eleven-and-awake-at-five Sakusa, but he liked a fight. It was the one situation where Kiyoomi could think of all the horrible fucking things on another human being’s skin and say, I could take that. I could take that and do more.
Kiyoomi liked a fight, and Miya was always up for one.
Miya wasted no time sweeping a kick at him when the barriers came up between them and the rest of the class. Kiyoomi caught his leg. Threw him down. Miya was up again with an implausible jump, a hurricane of fists Kiyoomi dodged by ducking to ram Miya’s torso head-on, slamming him up against the bumpy wall. Kiyoomi’s punch landed, but so did Miya’s sudden spinning kick, sending Kiyoomi down.
Within a second Miya was on him. The tang of their sweat filled Kiyoomi’s nostrils with the scent of brine. Kiyoomi threw himself upwards like the sharp half of a folding knife; their foreheads knocked together.
Kiyoomi took advantage of Miya’s one dazed second to slam him into the ground, reversing their positions.
A knee caught him in the side. Kiyoomi forced himself to take the blow and leaped up instead to avoid Miya’s follow-up punch, kicking him in his sitting position. Miya rolled with the impact. He jumped back up.
They circled each other. Miya spit out a cloud of red off to the floor by his right foot, which Kiyoomi watched with disgusted fascination. Kiyoomi redirected the pumping of his heart to the energy of the fight.
“Well? Don’t hold back,” he said.
There was that grin again, sharp as a blade and twice as dangerous. This time it was tinged pink.
Miya punched him in the stomach.
By the time Admiral Haiba used her manual override on the barrier controls to break them up, Miya was still hurtling his fist at Kiyoomi behind him, even with Kiyoomi’s chokehold around his neck. Kiyoomi let him go and Miya fell to the ground gasping. He lay there, staring blankly at the ceiling lights with his mouth open, chest heaving. None of Kiyoomi’s sparring partners had ever lasted this long, nor had they insisted on continuing the fight the first time Kiyoomi managed to beat them down.
There was blood on his face. Kiyoomi would examine his feelings about that later.
“Miya?” No response. “Are you there? Miya? Shit. Admiral, I think I cut off his oxygen sup—”
“‘M okay, ‘m okay!”
He took the hand Kiyoomi offered him, got up, and smiled at him again like a hellhound baring its teeth. Kiyoomi’s stomach did a traitorous flip. The test results were in, then.
The shower he took afterwards was so cold that Komori complained about the temperature of the tiles when he stepped inside afterwards. Kiyoomi would still have to be in close proximity to Miya tomorrow, in Lab 3A. Kiyoomi would still have to watch him pick fights with his War Studies professors with that punchable, cocksure smile on his face. He put the base of his palms over his closed eyes and dug them in so hard he saw stars when he opened his eyes again.
They finish the truffle project with Bokuto’s help, although it’s pretty much a moot point now—Hinata has stuffed his face with so many Godiva chocolates that now the mere mention of one splashes his face with a green tinge.
Miya then has enough time on his hands to be inspired by offhand mentions of obscure quantum manipulation techniques and his conversations with his brother (Osamu is the Second Officer of the USS Inari and a talented cook) which leads to him present more replicator modification proposals to Kiyoomi.
He has always been disturbingly excited about the replicator’s potential to render his brother’s hobby completely redundant.
First, Miya wants to make tempered chocolate, which is closest in composition to Hinata’s truffles. Then, after he and Kiyoomi figure that out, he moves on to spun sugar and caramel. Finally, as they near Bhanu, Miya becomes fascinated by Turkish ice cream, of all things. Bokuto is overjoyed that Kiyoomi and Miya seem to be neck-deep in the wonders of science. Hinata is exasperated because one of his engineers, Goshiki, keeps getting side-tracked from his actual duties to help Miya make his modifications. The rest of the crew welcomes the sudden expansion of dessert options.
Kiyoomi does not welcome the sudden reemergence of all his garbled Miya-related feelings.
It’s a desire that has been there for so long that Kiyoomi has learned how to manage it, to keep it from taking over his life; he does need to have an actual working relationship with the man. Most of the time, with Miya managing Security and Kiyoomi in the sick bay, he can safely ignore it. Like a stray cat that comes into your house and is too terrifying to be declawed, it doesn’t present a problem unless you prod it.
This—sitting together with Miya, heads bent over their PADDs and sketching out ideas—definitely counts as prodding it. The cat is hissing, teeth and claws out. It is just about ready to convert you from a Susceptible node to an Infected one in a rabies simulation. Miya has an essay on the replicable qualities of non-Newtonian fluids out, which Kiyoomi thinks is a bit excessive for Turkish ice cream.
“Miya.”
“Hm?”
“You think Hinata will date you because you make the replicator into a one-stop dessert shop?” In all the time he’s known Hinata, the man has never struck Kiyoomi as someone who could easily be wooed by trinkets or acts of extravagance. Miya, who is a hundred times more perceptive than Kiyoomi, must have noticed this. If Kageyama is getting anywhere with the redhead, it’s because of their legendary partnership-rivalry in the Academy, not the six-foot box of chocolates.
Miya laughs, shaking his head.
“What makes ya think Shouyou-kun’s ever gonna date me?”
What.
“What,” Kiyoomi says. “Then what is the whole point.”
“Maybe I just like tryin’ to give better gifts than Kenma Kozume. Ya should try it out sometime.” This does not seem like the kind of activity people should be ‘trying out’ for fun, not least of all because it seems likely to lead to either bankruptcy, or—like in Miya’s case—madness. “Anyway, all of it seems to make Shouyou-kun pretty happy anyway, so that’s good. I don’t wanna dwell on people I can’t have for too long.”
Kiyoomi wants to point out the contradictory nature of this statement, but decides this is not worth the trouble—besides, the way Miya is looking at him is making Kiyoomi’s face heat up. Who gave him eyes like that? They should be tried, drawn, and quartered. If a higher being exists, Kiyoomi would like to personally oversee its execution for giving Atsumu Miya the most dangerous gaze in history. He starts reading the essay on the non-Newtonian fluids to take his mind off the stirrings of a cosmic revolt in his brain.
It turns out that the Bhanuan celebration to inaugurate a new ambassador and to send off the old one lasts for two weeks.
“You know what that means,” Captain Meian says in his briefing, which Kiyoomi takes in the sick bay.
From the direction of the labs, Bokuto’s voice booms: “SHORE LEAVE!”
Kiyoomi suffers through the real thing and its echo through Meian’s announcement.
“I assume everyone heard that.” There’s an amused quirk at the corner of Meian’s mouth that Kiyoomi blames for enabling everyone’s absurd shenanigans on this ship full of maniacs. “Make some friends, buy some souvenirs. Enjoy your time. You’ve earned it. Meian out.”
Kiyoomi’s PADD dings.
From: Miya, Atsumu <[email protected]>
To: Sakusa, Kiyoomi <[email protected]>
Subject: Bhanuan diseases that can be contracted by Terrans and vice versa
I’m not gonna let you weasel out of spending shore leave on actual Bhanu instead of on the Anubis again. Read it. Planet’s safe.
Also, you’ve already had those shots. I’ve already had those shots too.
Commander Atsumu Miya
Chief Security Officer
USS Anubis (NCC-3869-A)
3 attachments: Terrans_on_Bhanu_medical_pamphlet.pdf, Bhanuans_on_Terra_medical_pamphlet.pdf, Bhanu_vaccination_scheme.pdf
Having had all his plausible defenses anticipated by Miya, Kiyoomi is forced to leave the ship. He would’ve done so anyway, seeing as they have to attend a few days of the ceremony, but now he has to spend the rest of the two weeks sampling Bhanuan cuisine and watching traditional dances. Miya asks him what he thinks of each restaurant after every meal like a very annoying review aggregator. Suspiciously, Kiyoomi finds himself liking more of the restaurants they eat at as time goes on.
The places they go to are all impeccably clean, somehow. Kiyoomi doesn’t hate this.
He develops a cough about a week in and looks up the symptoms on a Starfleet database. Miya is in the middle of trying to convince him that his lungs are not infested with the Bhanuan parasitic lungworm when his PADD dings and the notification nearly makes Miya’s eyes pop out of his head.
“Sonuvabitch,” he says, showing the screen to Kiyoomi, who had not asked to see.
From: Oikawa, Tooru <[email protected]>
To: [SHOUYOU LOVEFEST: Kageyama, Tobio <[email protected]>; Kozume, Kenma <[email protected]>; Miya, Atsumu <[email protected]>; Oikawa, Tooru <[email protected]>]
Subject: GUESS WHO PICKED WHAT UP IN BAYOR, BITCHES
You better step up your game.
[A selfie of Captain Tooru Oikawa with a little tube made out of some bluish metal, inlaid with crystals. He is sticking his tongue out and making a peace sign with his other hand.]
Captain Tooru Oikawa
USS Bluecastle (NCC-3002-F)
From: Kozume, Kenma <[email protected]>
To: [SHOUYOU LOVEFEST: Kageyama, Tobio <[email protected]>; Kozume, Kenma <[email protected]>; Miya, Atsumu <[email protected]>; Oikawa, Tooru <[email protected]>]
Subject: Re: GUESS WHO PICKED WHAT UP IN BAYOR, BITCHES
famous last words
From: Kageyama, Tobio <[email protected]>
To: [SHOUYOU LOVEFEST: Kageyama, Tobio <[email protected]>; Kozume, Kenma <[email protected]>; Miya, Atsumu <[email protected]>; Oikawa, Tooru <[email protected]>]
Subject: Re: Re: GUESS WHO PICKED WHAT UP IN BAYOR, BITCHES
Can Hinata even read poetry? Can Hinata even read?
Commander Tobio Kageyama
Chief Operations Officer
USS Garuda (NCC-3870-A)
From: Oikawa, Tooru <[email protected]>
To: [SHOUYOU LOVEFEST: Kageyama, Tobio <[email protected]>; Kozume, Kenma <[email protected]>; Miya, Atsumu <[email protected]>; Oikawa, Tooru <[email protected]>]
Subject: Re: Re: Re: GUESS WHO PICKED WHAT UP IN BAYOR, BITCHES
Haha. This, coming from the man who somehow got into Starfleet Academy while believing the Milky Way was a type of chocolate bar? That’s rich, Tobio-chan.
Captain Tooru Oikawa
USS Bluecastle (NCC-3002-F)
“Oikawa got Shouyou-kun a tube of Kebayor love poetry. Great, now Kozume’s probably gonna like, send us a diamond planet or somethin’, what am I supposed to do?”
Kiyoomi regrets the words right before he speaks them, but he supposes he has signed up to be Miya’s ally in his ill-advised quest to shower Hinata with gifts. Unofficially. And maybe he hadn’t been very happy with the way Miya deflated when Kozume gave Hinata his own chocolate factory complex. “Do you know about the Bhanuan love stone, Miya?”
“Uh, no.”
Apparently the one conversation he’d had with Hyakuzawa during his many months on the USS Anubis is finally going to be of some use.
“There’s a temple near the capital built on top of a cave. Apparently if you hold one of the stones you find inside and give it to someone you love, they’ll be able to feel your feelings for them.”
“What, like a… love potion? That’s skeevy, Omi.”
“No, not like a love potion. Whatever you’re feeling for that person, they get to experience for a limited amount of time. It doesn’t influence them in any way. That should be more romantic than whatever ancient scroll Oikawa got.”
Miya looks at him, saying nothing. There’s a tiny smile on his face that Kiyoomi likes very much—it is adorable, and Kiyoomi still has his cursed feelings—and hates at the same time.
“That means yer accompanyin’ me, right?”
“Someone has to make sure you don’t accidentally desecrate a holy site.”
The smile grows wider.
“Why are ya helpin’ me out, anyway?”
Kiyoomi sighs. He is actually prepared for this question, which should be a cause for concern. “If you kill yourself because of Kozume’s gifts, your successor is Koganegawa. Have one more hyperactive child in our ship’s command and Starfleet will change the USS Anubis's class to Daycare.”
“Aw, Omi-omi, ya think I’m mature?”
“A twelve year old is more mature than a toddler,” Kiyoomi points out.
There is a sign that means absolutely nothing to Kiyoomi above the structure where Miya is paying a Bhanuan teenager (you can tell by the red skin and lack of horns) to allow them into the temple. Several large posters plaster the walls. Intrigued by the playful illustrations, Kiyoomi holds up his PADD to translate them.
‘KEEP YOUR VOICE DOWN!’ says the first sign, which features an adorable catlike creature with its hands over its mouth. ‘IT IS A GOOD DAY TO NOT DIE IN AN AVALANCHE.’
Another one instructs the visitor: ‘TAKE SMALL PIECES ONLY. A STONE THE SIZE OF A FINGERNAIL IS ENOUGH FOR THE LOVE OF A LIFETIME.’ Below the text there is a drawing of a Bhanuan hand, which is roughly as big as a human hand, as well as the Standard measurements of a fingernail.
Then, the most tragic one has a drawing of a Bhanuan monk in their signature pink robes, face twisted in despair, rubbing their hands over their eyes. There are little blue bubbles around the hands. ‘YES, THIS IS A TEMPLE OF LOVE. NO, IT IS NOT A TEMPLE FOR MAKING LOVE.’
“Gross,” MIya says, tucking his head close to Kiyoomi’s so he can see the translation on the PADD. Kiyoomi is inclined to agree. He moves his head away.
Miya hands him a set of wireless earpods for the little audio tour guide gadget, through which a soothing voice explains the myths and legends associated with the temple as they walk past floating pinkish lanterns. Miya doesn’t comment, but he does make faces when he reacts. Kiyoomi didn’t know it was possible for a human mouth to twist itself into so many balloon animal shapes, but there you go.
The audio guide informs them when they’re nearing the shrine. Swirling ribbons and pipes made out of something that’s visually indistinguishable from glass start appearing near the cave walls, faintly luminous and all connected to each other. At the far end, they are connected to a gigantic arch-like structure with crystalline wheels. The idea, the guide tells Kiyoomi, is that as visitors chip away at the mountain by taking tiny rocks, the cave will move deeper into the heart of the mountain. Monks push the shrine further in whenever it becomes obvious that the cave has expanded.
Miya walks over to the arch, bends over, and straightens up with something in his hand. The audio guide explains the simple procedure required to ‘fill up’ a Bhanuan love stone: think about the object of your affections. The heavens will then connect your heart to the material of the stone, says the guide. Well then.
“Done, Miya?”
“Yeah, I think.”
“That was quick. Let’s go now so you can give it to Hinata as soon as possible before anything else reaches him. Wouldn’t want Tobio Kageyama to send him the manuscript of a romantic epic from Befri or anything.”
Kiyoomi walks. He does not hear the echo of another set of footsteps. He turns, and Miya is still standing there, motionless. Kiyoomi walks back to him and tries to take a look at his hand. Is it possible the stone has a jagged edge that gave Miya space tetanus? Kiyoomi didn’t think he’d have to bring supplies to a tourist trap, but he should have considered—
“Meat buns,” Miya says suddenly.
“Meat buns?”
“Shouyou-kun’s favorite food.”
“Right. What on Earth in here,” Kiyoomi says, looking around the temple, which is still full of intricate glass fixtures, nothing bun-like in sight, “made you think about meat buns , of all things?”
Miya bursts into quiet laughter. Space tetanus. Symptom one: intrusive thoughts.
“No, I—Omi-omi, if I really wanted to do the replicator modifications to win Shouyou-kun’s heart, I woulda tried to find out how to make meat buns, ‘cause they’re Shouyou-kun’s favorite food.”
“Yeah, and? Why didn’t you?”
“Too easy,” Miya says with a glint in his eye, grinning in a way that stops Kiyoomi’s heart for a second.
“If the objective was to impress Hinata, why the hell would you care about whether or not it’s too easy—”
“If the objective was to impress Shouyou-kun. Big if.”
Kiyoomi makes a face at him. Symptom two: deliriousness.
“You don’t really care about whether or not it’s easy, therefore the objective was not to impress Hinata? Contraposition? What is this, an Intro to Logic class?”
Miya laughs again, and he has to hit his own chest a few times as he wheezes. Quietly, of course, as to avoid triggering an avalanche. Kiyoomi watches him, eyes narrowed, waiting for him to stand up straight again. That wasn’t even funny. Maybe now he’s starting to figure out the root of Miya’s atrocious sense of humor. He genuinely thinks unfunny things are funny.
“Yanno, the thing with Shouyou-kun started off as a joke.” Miya finally says, looking at the rock in his hands, not at Kiyoomi. “Tobio-kun sent him this really funny Christmas sweater once, and I thought it’d be fun to give Shouyou-kun something cooler and send a picture of him wearing it to Tobio-kun. ‘N’then it just snowballed, I guess. I mean, it’s a lot of fun. Thinkin’ up stuff to outdo Oikawa, Tobio-kun, and Kozume is fun. Flirtin’ with Shouyou-kun is also always fun, ‘cause he’s such a good sport about it. I mean I know Shouyou-kun’s not interested, so I figured there’s no harm done.”
Miya turns the rock over. It gleams.
“So it’s like, I never expected it to come to anythin’ anyway. If Shouyou-kun actually did ask me out I’d be pretty bamboozled. But I really got into it, y’know, the character of the guy who’s always comin’ up with new stuff, who’s dotin’ on the guy he likes, ‘cause Shouyou-kun just lets it happen, I guess.” Now he turns to look at Kiyoomi. “Not like you ever would.”
What.
“What.”
“Ya didn’t notice? That one day in the Academy? When we finally finished that Materials Science project, and you kicked my ass in front of Admiral Haiba, and you thought you’d cut off my oxygen supply but I was just havin’ a moment with the singing angels.”
“I think that’s a plausible effect of not getting enough oxygen.”
“Look, I’m naturally loopy, man, you gotta let me live. Anyway, you were hot, smart, and you looked at me like you were gonna step on me. What the hell was I supposed to do?”
There is a beat where Kiyoomi realizes that this statement presents him with a whole host of interesting possibilities; he files them away for later.
“Hold on, I thought I was the one with the unrequited crush in the Academy,” he says, and Miya turns red.
“Why the hell would ya think that? You kept ignoring me when I hit on you, so I just thought you weren’t interested.” Kiyoomi wants to protest that Miya can’t possibly expect him to know how to handle flirting after years of repression, especially when Miya’s lines had been so bad Kiyoomi had concluded it had been some kind of fucked up reverse-psychology thing intended to let him down without actually letting him down. “Here. Go on, take it.”
Miya holds out his hand. The stone is shining now.
Kiyoomi takes it from him.
Something molten and white-hot rushes through him, searing every blood vessel as it shoots from his fingertips and the tips of his toes to his heart, his head. Kiyoomi can’t breathe through the smog of desire in his throat. Then, the heat simmers, softens as it diffuses again throughout his body, leaving him with a cloying fondness like sugar left on the roof of your mouth. It is the feeling of waking up and knowing you’re going to do things you didn’t think were possible yesterday. It’s the comforting thrum of a ship’s walls beneath your hand. It’s leaping and knowing you’ll be caught.
“Oh,” he says, then he tucks the stone in his pocket. Miya is watching him warily.
“Oh?” When Kiyoomi doesn’t say anything else, Miya laughs nervously to himself. “Jesus, tough crowd. Ya bare your soul to a guy and he gives ya one syllable to work with. At least reject me with some words, Omi-omi.”
Kiyoomi sighs. He takes a few steps forward and takes a stone of his own.
He thinks of Miya, reading a physics dissertation aloud in the sick bay, getting kicked down then punching up.
“I’m going to give this to you, but—you remember the poster with the monk washing his eyes with soap, right?” Kiyoomi glances backwards.
“Yeah.”
“Before I hand this over, we should probably leave this place.”
The grin, wild and brash and absolutely lethal, spreads slowly on Miya’s face, this time with the look Kiyoomi dares to call Miya’s bedroom eyes. Kiyoomi is still going to personally oversee the execution of whatever deity gave him those, but he’s not a completely ungrateful bastard—he’ll thank it for them first.