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i.
“So, as I’m sure you all know,” Nishizaki is flipping through papers on his clipboard, distracted even as he addresses them, “Yamada is gonna be out for a while ‘cause of his collarbone.” He grumbles something that sounds like ‘useless dumbass’ under his breath. “We’ll be bringing in a few temp guys to replace him. This week is, uh…” He glances over his shoulder. “Oi, you! Come introduce yourself!”
“Right, right!” The person who had been bowing profusely to the boss turns and jogs over to greet them. “I’m Shiina Yousuke! Good to be working w – ah.”
His eyes widen. Ikkou stares back at him.
Yousuke’s excited grin a moment later is almost too bright, he thinks.
“So funny how this keeps happening, right?” He slaps Ikkou on the arm, good-natured. “There’s gotta be so many part-time jobs in this city. Such a weird coincidence.”
“Mmhmm.” He can feel a tug at the corner of his mouth as he presses a box marked ‘kitchenware, non-fragile’ into Yousuke’s hands. “And I’m apparently responsible for you now, so you better work or we’ll both be in trouble.”
Nishizaki had looked thrilled upon realizing they knew each other and thus he could easily pass off job training to someone else. ‘Make sure he knows what he’s supposed to be doing,’ he’d muttered, leaning in close. ‘And doesn’t break anything.’
On paper, not breaking anything sounds incredibly simple for two ninjas. In practice, though…
”Hey, you know this reminds me,” Yousuke chatters as he trails after him, along the winding, flower-bordered path up to the house. “You never answered me last time. When I asked you your sign and your blood type and all that.”
That tug at his mouth gets the better of him this time, a small, fleeting smile.
“Type A,” he says, once they’ve made their way into the kitchen, finding a spare section of countertop to set his own box down on. “And my birthday is January 12th. Not sure what sign that is.”
Yousuke looks as if he’s doing some sort of mental calculation. “Capricorn,” he says, and seems to deflate visibly at the revelation. “Pretty bad compatibility, huh…”
“Compatibility?”
“Oh, nothing!” His laugh is a little too loud. “Doesn’t matter! It’s all just fake anyway, right? Astrology. Who pays attention to that stuff?” He rubs at the back of his neck awkwardly as they head back to the truck. “Can’t believe you didn’t say anything about your birthday when it happened, though,” he says, looking perturbed over the top of the decorative lamp he’s hefted into his arms.
Ikkou raises an eyebrow. “We were a little busy at the time, Yousuke.”
“Still! We could’ve at least gotten you, like, a cake or something.” He’s pouting a bit when Ikkou turns away from him, and it’s – cute. Extremely cute. “Though I guess this way I have a lot of time to plan what to get you next year. What kinda things are you into, anyway?”
“…Things?”
“Yeah, like. Favorite music?”
Ikkou takes a long time to ponder this – until they’re back in the house and he’s set down the two chairs he was carrying with a thunk.
“Does taiko count?”
Yousuke’s stifled laugh is not unkind; rather, there’s something fond about it, a warmth of familiarity. “I mean. Not really. How about… I’ll let you borrow some of my favorite CDs, okay? Just as like, a place to start. You don’t have to get into those bands or anything. Though it’d be cool if you did. Since then we could go to concerts together, maybe.”
There’s an odd feeling sitting in the space between his ribs – restlessness, almost, though that’s not quite right. More of a gentle ache.
“That sounds good,” Ikkou says softly.
They almost make it through the morning without incident. Until Yousuke tries to talk while also climbing the stairs with a large box in hand, getting a little too expressive in his recounting of being woken up at five in the morning by Oboro the weekend prior just to test some new piece of tech she’s working on. His foot misses the next step. He makes a surprised little “oh” noise as he teeters backward.
Ikkou manages to precariously balance his own box on one hand and brace his footing in the split second needed to catch him against his chest.
“You know it should technically be impossible, right,” he says drily, cheek pressed against Yousuke’s hair. The arm circling his waist is probably just a bit too tight. “To be a trained ninja and clumsy at the same time.”
Yousuke seems like he can’t decide between sheepish and defensive as he turns his head to give him a sidelong look. There’s a faint pink tinge to his cheeks. “That’s…! It’s all about modes, okay? Ninja mode Yousuke is different than regular mode.”
He squirms his way out of Ikkou’s hold and rights himself on the stairs. “Plus,” he adds with a grin, “I’ll never die when you’re around, right? So I don’t have to worry.”
Ikkou blinks after him as he continues up the steps, around the corner of the landing and out of sight. He huffs out a quiet, disbelieving laugh in the silence.
“Yeah, that’s right,” he murmurs, shifting what he’s carrying to his other hip and following close behind.
ii.
He’s not sure why he wanders into the bakery, in the end. With his thirty minute break already ticking away, it would’ve been smarter to get some real food, some actual sustenance, rather than seeking out a strong cup of coffee.
But there he finds himself nonetheless, in line behind a surprising throng of people, including an entire gaggle of teen girls who seem like they might be skipping school, each of them pointing excitedly at the selection of colourful desserts in the display case. And he supposes it’s a sign that he’s getting complacent, letting his guard down and his observational skills fade in a world without Jakanja, that he gets all the way up to the counter before he notices who’s behind it, working alone during the rush.
“Oh god, Ikkou,” Yousuke says desperately. His hair is getting long enough again to pull back in a tiny ponytail, but several strands have fallen loose around his face. The white bakery uniform is smudged with something that looks like strawberry frosting. His expression is a bit manic as he lunges across the counter to grab his hands. “I’m so glad to see you. You’ll help me, right? Just for a bit? Please?”
He can’t. He really can’t. He has his own job to get back to in less than twenty minutes.
Yousuke’s grip on his hands tightens. His eyes are gently pleading.
“…Fine,” Ikkou concedes. “But you owe me.”
He gets the full story, of course, told in harried snippets in between customers. This is getting to be a bad habit of Nakata-san’s, apparently, heading off on important errands on days when it just so happens to get “crazy busy.” Yousuke doesn’t know why he won’t hire any new regular staff after Ami went off to college last year. The bakery’s clearly doing okay, isn’t it? Even Reiko was suggesting it a few days ago.
All of this is told to Ikkou as if he knew who any of these people were, and there’s something comforting in that, as talking to Yousuke often is. Never any barriers, or over-explanations. Never any skirting around the sheer breadth of things that Ikkou quite obviously Does Not Know. Just whatever is on his mind. The playing field from Yousuke’s point of view seems to always be entirely level.
“Hey, you’re pretty good at that,” he comments, once the rush of customers is beginning to thin.
Ikkou looks down at the cupcake he’s in the middle of frosting, pale against the deep red velvet cake. Not something temp workers usually do, Yousuke had informed him, but the cupcake shortage had been getting a little dire.
“You think? Is it supposed to be difficult?”
Yousuke scowls without any bite to it. “Oh, for you it’s easy, huh? This is what mine look like.” He plucks a reject cupcake out of a tupperware container and holds it out for him to see the sad, uneven mass of pink frosting he somehow managed to laden the thing with. Ikkou’s lips twitch with a stifled laugh.
“There’s a lot of precise hand movements and control in ninjutsu. I’d say the skill carries over easily enough.” A pause, as he finishes the last sworl of frosting and sets his completed work aside. “At least in my case. Not all of us are so fortunate.”
Grinning, he ducks out of the way of the hand towel Yousuke tries to hit him with.
“Have you ever thought about it, though?” Yousuke has switched gears a minute later, looking pensive as he restocks the chocolate torte. “Having like… a normal job instead of being a ninja? Not just part-time to get by, but. Like a career.”
Ikkou can feel his brow furrow. “No,” he says after a moment. “Never.”
“Seriously? Man, when I was younger I wanted to be like fifty different things,” he laughs. “A baseball player, I think, even though I sucked at sports, and an archaeologist ‘cause I wanted to dig up treasure, and a zookeeper… But I guess you’ve been training hardcore since you were a kid, huh? You didn’t have time to think about dumb shit like that.”
Time? Is that what’s stopped him from ever contemplating a different life? Or is it something else? A tragic lack of imagination, maybe. He wonders if it was all wrung out of him from the start, from the day he was born with a vice grip already around his throat. Or maybe he never would’ve had it. Impossible to say, he supposes, as something tense and bitter comes to sit in the pit of his stomach.
“Well, if it counts for anything,” Yousuke says with a broad smile, “I think you’d be great at this. Working in a bakery or a restaurant or whatever. If you ever quit being a ninja, I mean. I think you’d be great at a lot of stuff.” A voice calling ‘excuse me’ shifts his attention, and he turns away, jogs over to the counter with a “sorry, sorry, how can I help you?”
That sharp, acrid feeling recedes as quick as it came as Ikkou stares at his back.
He picks up another cupcake and examines it, pensive. This is all a little adorable for him, isn’t it? He must look out of place right now, in his pure white uniform under the bright kitchen lights, standing in the midst of tins of sprinkles and fruit tarts left to cool. But it’s a nice thought. A nice dream.
He can feel his phone buzzing in his pocket. The boss, most likely, or Isshu, demanding to know why the hell he never came back after his break.
Yousuke whips around excitedly after the customer has left. “Hey, Ikkou, that lady just complimented one of the cupcakes you did! She said ‘it’s so cute’! I told you, man.”
“My greatest achievement,” he calls back flatly, but he finds himself smiling, small and pleased, as he goes to prep the frosting and start the next batch.
iii.
“Oh,” Yousuke says, lowering his bowl of noodles as a thought occurs to him. “The chief has me working at the docks again for a bit. Hauling stuff around and all that. And there’s another open space. You should ask about it if you need the money.” He pulls a face. “The guy in charge is such a hardass, though. Swear he’s like, always one second from blowing his top.”
It’s not the most appealing job offer – he’s started to get bored with the ones that require only physical strength, with nothing besides it to occupy his mind.
But working with Yousuke is a positive enough tradeoff, he supposes.
When he encounters him: the dock manager, Oosugi – a hard, lined face with an expression of constant suspicion, a cigarette perpetually clamped between his teeth – he thinks that Yousuke was mistaken. This person wouldn’t ever “blow his top.” It’s right there in his eyes. Too vicious and calculating for that. Anything this man does is done with absolute intent.
Ikkou knows the type.
His presence seems to strain the atmosphere among the workers, though “thankfully he’s not around all that often,” whispers Tamura, a younger guy who Yousuke has befriended. They watch from afar as Oosugi consults with the foreman while jabbing at the air with his cigarette for punctuation before turning on his heel and stalking back to his car.
Tamura isn’t much more than a kid, really. Eighteen or so, underfed and clearly unfit for this sort of labor. He says he had to beg his way into the job. His family has fallen on hard times, and there are seldom few above-board places that will hire a high school dropout with some questionable marks on his record. Ikkou can only assume those were the result of some other misfortune, as he seems too meek to have committed any offenses purposefully. He also seems, Ikkou can’t help but notice, more than a little taken with Yousuke, turning bright red whenever he’s smiled at.
Can’t exactly fault him for that.
“So where d’you guys know each other from?” he asks on the fifth day on the job. His tone is forcedly casual – trying to read the room as to their exact relationship without coming out and saying it. They’ve been assigned to winch operating duty today, hoisting freight from the ship’s deck onto the dock using the mechanized pulley system, and the two of them pause in the middle of securing the current load, exchanging a glance.
“We keep meeting at jobs like these,” Ikkou says drily, and Yousuke laughs.
“Yeah, yeah, that’s it. And now we have ramen together every week.”
Tamura looks a bit bewildered as he nods. “Oh. I see,” he lies. When Yousuke steps away to start up the machinery, Tamura leans in closer, visibly nervous, and says: “So. Just curious, but, do you know if Shiina has, like. A girlfriend. Or maybe. Y’know. A boyf – ”
Over the hum of the winch mechanism, which has now lifted the freight past the railing of the ship, there is an ominous crack like something giving way.
They all freeze, staring up at the cargo – more specifically, at one of the straps intended to be holding it, which is instead hanging torn and frayed where it has just snapped clean in half. Inch by inch, the crate itself is beginning to unbalance in its supports.
“Oh shit,” Tamura whispers, just before the thing slides free and smashes against the dock below with the force of a bomb blast.
Later, Ikkou will have his doubts that it was truly any of their “fault.” The machinery and equipment is old, after all: unsafe and rusting, should’ve been replaced years ago if not for the penny-pinching of the people in charge. But Oosugi, standing in front of them now with a muscle twitching beneath his eye, clearly has his heart set on picking one of them to blame. And Tamura, looking very much like a frightened prey animal in this moment, makes for the easiest target.
“Way I hear it from one the other boys, you were just chatting away all casual-like.” Oosugi steps threateningly closer to the kid. “While you were supposed to be focusing on doing your damn job. Interesting, that.”
Tamura flinches, and he looks so young, for a moment even younger than he is –
Ikkou’s thoughts seem to narrow. He can hear himself breathing.
“It was entirely my fault, sir,” he says, clipped, folding his hands behind his back and snapping to attention. “I distracted him with questions. I still hadn’t learned my tasks, and asked him to advise me. Full responsibility lies with me.”
He can feel Tamura’s wide eyes on him, but his focus is fixated on Oosugi, whose expression is one of quietly simmering contempt as stops and gives him a slow once-over.
“You, huh? Y’know, you seemed competent enough when you showed up here. But I guess you can never tell, can you? Which ones are going to be useless trash.”
“Oi,” Yousuke pipes up. “That’s being pretty harsh – ”
“You shut up, boy, or your neck will be in danger, too,” he growls, still staring straight at Ikkou with his eyes like chips of flint. “What’re you planning to do to make up for this, huh? You gonna buy this freight from me?”
“I don’t have the money for that, sir.”
“Of course you don’t, you pathetic idiot,” the man hisses, and Ikkou can see it as if in slow motion: his hand raising, an open palm, which is always a kind of small relief. He can picture the arc it will take as it swings towards his face, and he steels himself against it, setting his jaw and standing straight-backed and stiff, and –
Yousuke is there in between, catching the hit before it can land.
“What the hell,” he snaps, shoving Oosugi away. “You think just ‘cause – just ‘cause we work for you, you can treat us like this? Assault is still a crime, asshole! We’ve got… workers’ rights, you know!” He’s visibly floundering as he tries to think up more legally sound rebuttals. “I’ll be telling my chief about this! Forget this job. You can find someone else to do it. C’mon, Ikkou.”
His hand curls around his wrist as he pulls him away.
By the time they slow their pace, the dock undoubtedly out of sight behind them, the imprint of those fingers around his wrist are the only thing Ikkou can actually feel. Everything else is – detached, as if he were unmoored from himself, receding like a low tide from the shore.
“What’s with you?” Yousuke snaps, spinning around to glare at him. Ikkou is grateful that he still doesn’t let go. “You were just gonna let him hit you? You could kick that guy’s ass in a single second!”
He does feel something else, he realizes: sickly. Nauseous. His blood itself has curdled.
Yousuke’s anger seems to falter and fade as he observes him. “…Ikkou? You okay?”
“You couldn’t flinch,” he hears himself say. Distant, like hearing it from another room. “If you… did something deserving of punishment. You couldn’t flinch. Flinching is a sign of weakness. You had to accept it. Or else it would be worse.”
Yousuke blinks, uncomprehending at first, but after a long moment it seems to dawn on him all at once, his eyes gone round and horrified for an instant before his anger returns in force.
“That’s – what? Are you serious right now?” His foot is tapping against the pavement, and he begins to pace back and forth with a kind of livewire energy, bringing his fist to meet his palm with a smack, expression dark enough that it looks all wrong on his face. “I just wanna – go back there and sock that guy! Like he’s probably done to ten other guys who couldn’t fight back! And, and, then I wish I could time travel, so I could do the same to your shitty old man! Before he ever – ever got to – ” And here he stops. The rage-fueled energy left him quick as it came, shoulders slumped, hands falling to his sides. “But. But I guess… it’s pointless to even think about, right? Stuff that already happened.”
In silence, he seems to be considering his options. Finally, he gives Ikkou a tentative glance.
“You want a hug?” he asks.
Ikkou stares back at him. It’s not a question he’s ever been asked before.
“I. Yeah,” he says hoarsely.
Yousuke nods, the smile returning to his face, and steps forward to do just that. He puts his arms around his neck and pulls him in close, so that they fit together, the line of his body warm. Ikkou takes a breath – easier, suddenly, as if some great pressure were easing from his throat. He reaches up slowly to press a hand against the small of Yousuke’s back. Curls his fingers in.
“What’re we doing still working these stupid part-time jobs, anyway,” Yousuke mutters against his shoulder. “Didn’t we graduate? Shouldn’t we have careers now? Ninja school is such a racket, man.”
Ikkou finds himself laughing at that – a small, startled sound, like he’d never expected to laugh again.
“It really is,” he murmurs, and wraps his arms tight around Yousuke’s waist.