Chapter Text
Kiyoomi doesn’t have time anymore to text you to hurry up and get here at this very moment because, before he realizes, this girl—a girl he’s never seen before—with bleached hair and a habit of touching the hem of her skirt when nervous is now right in front of him, handing him two boxes of what he thinks are chocolates. “I disinfected them because I know how much you hate germs,” she says. She touches her skirt, her hair. He’s sure she meant the boxes, not the chocolates inside..?
Still, he doesn’t want to take the chocolates. In the brief second that follows, she launches on a long heartfelt speech that he loses track of after five minutes. After what felt like three more minutes, she tries to touch him, but he dodges on instinct. He’s slowly losing his options; he wants to get out of this situation fast without being rude.
Your laughter reaches Kiyoomi’s ears before even he sees you. For a second he’s thankful you’ve finally arrived, but then he stops. Being with you is pleasant, but it's certainly bound to be anything but uneventful. He narrows his eyes, So what's it gonna be today? He looks in your direction for just a moment and he sees you waving goodbye to one of his teammates who goes inside the gym. He watches as you approach them. Slowly.
“Uhm, hi,” you say, unsure, as you stand beside him. “My name’s [Y/N], and I…will hold on to these,” you struggle to say as you gingerly take the boxes from the girl’s hands, your eyes darting towards him, “as his…” you furrow your brows, “…manager. His personal manager.”
What? He squints at you as you turn to face his direction. You’re a terrible, terrible liar. Not that he can speak for himself; he’s lost count of the number of times you both have sworn that you’re never hiring one another in a criminal heist. “Oh—! And as his Chem lab partner,” you quickly add from behind him after taking about a couple more steps. “Chem. About to start in 15 minutes…”
His eyebrows are now permanently etched together and he is grateful for the face mask. As if realizing what your words must’ve been implying, however, the girl returns her attention to him and stutters: “Oh, uhm. I wouldn’t keep you standing here for long, Sakusa-san. I hope you like the chocolates! If you enjoy them, my number is written at the back of the envelope. You may give me a call or text and I will bring you some more!”
Et cetera, et cetera.
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The two of you walk together in silence, his pace slowing down to match yours, having given up a long time ago on making you catch up to him. (“It’s not my fault I have shorter legs.” “Not significantly so, you simply refuse to walk faster.” “Oh, for the love of—“). He notices just now that you don’t have your bag with you. That means you don’t have class this morning and you're only out early for lunch. Ah, he remembers, it’s Wednesday. After lunch, you’ll head off to the Fine Arts department to get the keys to one of their studios, wherein you’ll once again hole up to continue working on your piece for an upcoming exhibit. You will be there for hours, working ‘till very late. On days like this, his only parting words would always be: “Eat,” which you’d promptly forget the moment you turn around the corner.
He’s the first one to break the silence. “So. Tell me about this Chem homework.”
“We don’t have any homework. We don’t have Chemistry together, not anymore since we were freshmen.” You wince; only first-years get to take the general Chemisty subject, unless you’re a repeater. “And I, certainly, do not have class for the next couple of hours.”
He grunts, his way of saying thank you for getting him out of that awkward situation, lame excuses notwithstanding. You laugh, lightly bumping your arms to his. His hands are still tucked inside his jacket pockets and he doesn’t avoid the contact. He catches the faint scent of alcohol mixed with the vanilla-scented hand soap you always buy because of the nice packaging. He idly wonders if your hands are still rough from washing them with soap too often, even with all the hand creams he’s gifted you in every birthday and in any other gifting occasion that it’s become a sort of inside joke between you two. He’s the only person that you know in your life who gifts people hand creams and mean it, not because they come in discounted gift packs in malls during the holiday season. So you take these gifts with solemn gratitude and arranges them in a small, makeshift shrine in your bathroom, thanking Omi-sama for another year of bountiful supplies by sending him an annual selfie with your growing collection. You now have enough hand creams to last you another four years, you’ve told him last time.
You make your way to the wide open garden where most students hang in the breaks between classes. You find a bench that sits comfortably under a wide canopy, the one that you like because of the back rest. There’s an unspoken agreement that the chocolates are now yours; still, you look at him as you hold the boxes up and you wait for him to nod in response.
In the same delicate way you sort and clean your brushes, you tug at the ribbons and carefully unpack one of the boxes. He follows the shifting hidden expressions in your eyes as you inspect the gift: delight, surprise, a slight quirking between your eyebrows to express wonder. “Oh, this one’s yours, Kiyoomi,” you murmur, almost to yourself, as you pick up the envelope with the heart-shaped tape on the flap, setting it aside for him to read for later.
“That’s yours now, too.”
You sigh, a knowing smile tugging at your lips, as you uncoil the tiny silver ribbon around the foil, carefully removing the ball of 75% dark chocolate from the middle, turning it around between your thumb and index finger. You don't know if he's stated anywhere that he prefers dark chocolates, but somehow, his admirers just know. As you mull this over, Kiyoomi sees that you don’t have bandaged fingers today and he mentally ticks that off as one small nice thing for today…if this day is all about tallying good things and bad. For a second, he isn’t sure if the knowing smile is for him or for the chocolate. He figures it’s for him since you never liked dark chocolate at all.
(You gave him half of the sweets you received at last year’s Valentine’s—all of them dark—which you knew he liked, in spite of the obvious frown on his face when you handed him the heavy bag. In exchange, he gave you all his vanilla and white chocolate ones.)
“You need a contingency measure for when that happens again, you know,” you take another wrapped chocolate, “like a list of excuses to suddenly leave, or…a believable reason why they should definitely disinfect the package right in front of you, no matter if they try to convince you they already did.”
Kiyoomi blinks slowly and turns his head. “Why would they do that.”
“I don’t know. I said believable.” He hums a non-response. “Tell them…you will high-five them if you do.”
“Absolutely not.”
You grin at him with the mirth of a little girl. “I say the more far-fetched your excuse, the more they likely won’t question it. Because who in their right mind would make that up?”
“You always come up with the worst lies.” You gasp: “No, I don’t?” You then recall this one kid in Hyogo from your childhood who absolutely stuck to his story of a dragon attacking his home the night before and swallowing his homework, along with the rest of his family. And it was the utter strangeness of it, and the kid’s conviction that it really did happen, that you believe convinced the teachers and your classmates that, maybe, half of it’s true, that perhaps the dragon and his family getting eaten were simply a metaphor for something. (It was the week you discussed figures of speech in grammar class and this was why this explanation appealed to you back then.) That, or he’s a looney. You’ve told him this story twice now, but he doesn’t mention this to you. He has fun with the way your hands go around and gesture with every word.
Depending on the context, he realizes, this story could be interpreted as sad or funny.
“That.” Kiyoomi deadpans. “Is the sort of roundabout excuse you would come up with.” He hears you utter a small wow, before you throw a balled foil wrapper at his face which he narrowly dodges with a slight movement of his head.
You were about to say something back but then you stop. You chew silently for a few seconds, before your eyes go slightly wide.
“Omi—“ you cover your mouth while you chew, the other hand pausing in mid-air. Finally, you crack a smile, pointing at your mouth. “Dried plum!” You spend the next 5 minutes grouping the similarly-packaged dried-plum-filled chocolates on one side and the rest of the assorted flavors on the other. You insist that they are his only, to please have a taste, at least, to which he responds with a half-hearted good luck to that.
You both stay quiet for a while, content with each other’s company. He thinks he’ll rarely get quiet moments such as this in the coming weeks, or months probably, even. Hell week is what they call the five grueling days of final exams at the end of each term, but for seniors, it can stretch up to an entire semester, or even an entire year, if one is not careful enough. He’s never had problems with school before and he certainly will not now, so he doesn’t worry much. Still, he appreciates the quiet lulls in-between—the silly banter over cheap cafeteria coffee in the morning (which you insist on getting because you seem to be their only customer); over eat-all-you-can Shabu-Shabu in that new place across your school (to which he only agreed on going with you with the promise of safe cooking time and temperature for all the meat plus extra chopsticks for each plate to avoid cross-contamination, and which he decided wasn’t so bad); or even over your dorm’s cafeteria food, which you know you both hate but the two of you always end up eating anyway, more out of tradition than anything else, the food almost unnoticed in the easy flow of your conversation (or the non-awkward silence in the spaces between).
He remembers that you’ll practically spend the rest of your day today alone in a studio, toiling until the work that you’ve done finally satisfies you (which, somehow, it rarely does, and Kiyoomi would oftentimes wonder as he stares at the artworks he can only describe as beautiful). Who knows when you’ll see each other again? Perhaps next week, if you manage to finish your work early? Or tonight if you even remember to eat. A cold feeling almost creeps into him, but it doesn’t linger for long. Your voice brings him back to the present moment: “these aren’t actually bad,” you nod, satisfied. You search for the letter you’ve set aside from earlier. “I think maybe I can text her to bring you some again.”
“Do that,” he retorts, without missing a beat, “and you will never step foot in a live volleyball game ever again.” You roll your eyes. Rude, you tell him, biting your lower lip to keep yourself from laughing. You don’t say a word but he’s sure you’re having fun at the sheer idea of the girl popping out of nowhere with her boxes of chocolates to torment him again. You laugh anyway right as the school bell commences, signaling the start of your one-and-a-half-hour free period before lunch. You used to debate over the number of ‘DING DONGs’ the bell repeats; one time he confidently counted fifteen, but you swore you’d counted twenty. He took a mental note to count again if he remembers. Loser pays for lunch.
(You don’t realize that the school bell alternates between fifteen and twenty rings, and neither of you ever bothers opening the topic to anyone else.)
He loses count, however, as your laughter drowns out the otherwise intrusive medley. He never questions what you laugh at anymore—some crude remark you wouldn’t dare react to in front of others, a random meme you remember seeing last night, a normal-looking person with hair that you swear resembles a sleeping lion from a certain angle, or randomly remembering one of his funny anecdotes about Ushijima Wakatoshi—he simply steals a fleeting glance at you from the corner of his eyes. Perhaps the only big event by the end of the day would be you laughing above the noise in the middle of this chaos that is pre-lunch period, like this, right here, but he certainly, honestly wouldn't mind.
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(He snatches one ball from your dried-plum-filled pile and you beam at him triumphantly.)