Work Text:
Keisuke wakes up with a crick in his neck and a pounding headache. He rolls over and groans. There’s weak light filtering through the curtains of the room he’s in. He’s lying on a futon, close to the ground, staring at the wood floor under a TV stand. He breathes in a dust mote and sneezes.
He was out late last night, drinking with a few people from work and his deskmate Miyagi. He’s pretty sure that he’s managed to end up on Miyagi’s guest futon, sprawled out and hungover in his living room.
Keisuke met Miyagi on the first day of work, when his pen exploded during orientation and covered both of them in ink. Keisuke had been a huge spazz about the whole thing, but Miyagi had been really chill. He’d called his roommate, a tall scary-looking dude with bleached hair that answered to Rutta, and he’d shown up to the office with a clean shirt for both Keisuke and Miyagi. An hour later Keisuke had walked into the records room to find that his and Miyagi’s desks had been placed next to each other, and they’d been friends since.
It wasn’t a totally one-sided relationship, Miyagi helped Keisuke stop being such a complete space-case, and Keisuke showed Miyagi how to stop burning the salmon he brought for lunch. They’d gone out for drinks a couple times, sometimes with coworkers and once with Miyagi’s roommate and his roommate’s enormously tall friend. But he’d never drunk as much then as he apparently did last night.
Keisuke groans and sits up. Time for a glass of water. He slept in his clothes and they're clammy with sweat and the smell of cheap beer. Ugh. The apartment is dark, and he can’t hear anything from down the hall, so he makes his way as quietly as he can over to the kitchen sink. He pours himself a glass of water and drinks it, staring absentmindedly at the fridge.
There’s a photo there, held to the fridge by a magnet advertising a plumbing business. It’s of Miyagi and his roommate Ruizaki, and a girl and boy that Keisuke doesn’t recognize. They’re all in school uniforms, clutching diplomas and each other, smiling. It’s a good photo, Keisuke thinks. His gaze wanders to the photo next to it. This is a series of photo booth pictures. The photo booth has given them unnatural porcelain skin and huge eyes, but Keisuke recognizes Ruizaki and what looks like a girlfriend. In the first photo they’re grinning and winking at the camera, and by the last photo Ruizaki is kissing the girl’s cheek while she laughs. She’s got short hair cut in a boyish style, gelled back in the same way Miyagi does his hair… Then Keisuke wakes up a little more, and he realizes it is Miyagi. All four of the little photos in the series are covered in various heart stickers, and the final one has “5 years!” written in English across the bottom.
Kesiuke straightens up and looks around the apartment again. There are more photos on the fridge, and a few more in frames scattered around the main room. Almost all of them are of Miyagi and Ruizaki, sometimes by themselves and sometimes with others. In every photo they’re touching in some way - an arm slung around the other’s shoulder, mostly, but in one that sits on a desk by the sliding glass door out to the balcony, they’re fast asleep, curled like commas, leaning in towards each other. They look young, younger than the photo of their high school graduation.
Well shit, Keisuke thinks. He’s never heard Miyagi mention he was dating anyone, let alone his roommate. Although he gets why wouldn’t necessarily mention the roommate part at work. Still, this seems like a big thing for Keisuke to have missed. Should he have been paying more attention?
There’s a sound behind him, and he turns to see Ruizaki standing there, dressed in a faded t-shirt and sleep pants. His hair sticks out in every direction; he must have just woken up. He’s looking past Keisuke at the photo.
“Our first year of high school,” he says, gesturing. “I wasn’t on good terms with my family then, and Kodama dragged me home with him at New Years. His dad took that photo of us.” He smiles. “His dad says that’s when he knew.”
“Knew what?” Keisuke asks stupidly. Ruizaki just looks at him, eyebrow quirked.
“Oh,” Keisuke says. “Right. He knew that you were… yeah.”
“Uh huh,” Ruizaki says. “That gonna present a problem for you?”
“What?” Kesiuke says. He waves his hands. “No, god no, I was just surprised, Miyagi never mentioned a girlfriend, or shit, uh, a-a boyfriend, and I-" Ruizaki cuts him off with a hand. He’s laughing.
“Look, Kodama is hung over as hell, he’ll be sleeping like the dead all morning. We’d already talked about telling you, but he probably wants to do it properly. Feel free to take a shower and eat some breakfast before you go, and then go get lunch with him this week sometime, okay?”
Keisuke nods, and that’s it. Ruizaki lends him a towel, and after he’s showered and eaten the toast Ruizaki makes him, he’s out the door and on the train home. Two girls sit across from him in the car, huddled over their phones. Their heads bump, and they look up at each other, noses almost touching. One of them giggles, and then they both collapse into laughter. Keisuke catches himself wondering if that’s what Miyagi and Ruizaki looked like, huddled close in a train car on a cold December day, headed to meet Miyagi’s parents. He shakes his head and pulls out his phone.
Thanks for letting me spend the night, I owe you one, he types. Let’s get lunch this week? My treat!