Work Text:
“Rin, you know that promise we made five years ago?” Sousuke says. Rin can't hear him. He's talking to the ceiling and his headphones are bleeding music. Why is his music so loud? Can Sousuke even hear himself? Rin asks him to turn it down and repeat himself, which he does. “The five-year-old promise that you would do anything I ask you to do,” he elaborates as he pulls his headphones out of his ears. Rin hears him this time.
“What about it,” he asks the underside of Sousuke's bunk. Sousuke doesn't answer him. Rin pushes up against Sousuke's bed with his foot. “Stop,” says Sousuke. Rin does not. “What about it!” he repeats, giving one last push to where he imagines Sousuke's butt is before lowering his foot.
“You say that like you already said something and I didn't answer you,” Sousuke says, leaning over the railing to look at Rin. The one earbud that he wrapped around the back of the shell of his ear falls off and hangs over the railing as well. Rin grabs at it, misses, does not try again.
“I did, you just didn't hear me,” he claims. Sousuke lies back down, rests his head on one arm and drapes the other arm over the edge of his bed under the railing. Rin saw the smirk on his face before he ducked out of view and it annoys him. “What,” he says. “You never listen to anything and you never speak loud enough so I never hear you and you never hear anyone else and it's your fault and you know it.”
Sousuke laughs, quietly, into his arm, and asks Rin to repeat himself one more time. Rin says fuck you. Sousuke reels his dangling headphones back onto his bed and wraps them up and shoves them into his pocket. He lifts his head again and pulls his arm back up and props himself up on that arm's elbow and tells the floor that he wants to use it now. The promise, that is. Rin pops his head out over the edge of his bed and looks up. Sousuke waves at him. Rin frowns and raises an eyebrow.
“On what?” he asks. Sousuke wonders if it counts as raising an eyebrow if your head's not upright when you do it. Rin's eyebrow moved in a horizontal direction in accordance to the horizontal orientation of his head. Actually, Sousuke thinks eyebrows probably just move in relation to the face they're on? Sousuke is still thinking about this when Rin's eyebrow drifts back to its regular position over his eye; he can't hold that particular facial expression for more than a few seconds. For someone who tries to emote through his eyebrows so often you'd think he'd be better at it by now. Sousuke tries to remember what he was thinking before he started philosophizing about eyebrows. Rin says “Sousuke!” and Sousuke says “ahhhhh” and then he says “oh yeah” and “can you get me a soda?”
Rin lowers(?) an eyebrow and sneers, and holds that face for a few seconds before retracting his head and sighing a sigh and rolling his eyes and rolling his legs out of bed. His feet thud on the floor when he stands up and he gets close to Sousuke's face and wrinkles his nose at him. “Seriously?” he says.
“Yeah,” Sousuke replies. “Or coffee or something. I'm really tired.”
“Out of everything in the entire world you could ask me for. You're gonna waste this golden opportunity on a drink.”
“It's been five years and I haven't thought of anything else,” Sousuke says. He yawns, as if to emphasize his claim of tiredness. Rin's not tired but he yawns too, without covering his mouth.
“Literally, you could ask for anything, why the hell would you cash that in on something like that?” he asks, rubbing his eye with one hand as he speaks. “This is insulting.”
“Don't yawn into my face, that's so gross,” Sousuke complains. Rin's face is close enough that Sousuke can reach over and shove his forehead with his fingertips. Rin slaps his hand away. Sousuke laughs as he tells Rin that his breath smells terrible. He wants to know when the last time he brushed his teeth was, and what poor soul was sacrificed for his most recent meal. “Am I ever going to see Momo again?” he asks.
“No,” says Rin. “He's gone.”
“That's fucked up, Rin, you can't do things like that.”
“It's too late.”
“You're a monster.”
"I can't be stopped.”
“Didn't I ask you to get me a drink?”
“Fuck you, you can't use your promise on a beverage.”
“But I want to.”
“No,” Rin insists, scowling vigorously. “I can buy you a drink that is not tied to the promise I made you five years ago that I would do anything you wanted,” he offers.
Sousuke raises his eyebrows (unquestionably, as his head is basically upright). “Oh, really,” he says. He drums on the frame of the bed with the pads of two of his fingers. The sound it makes is very quiet.
“I was gonna get something myself at some point anyway, so I might as well,” Rin explains.
“And you're buying it, which means I don't have to pay you back?” asks Sousuke.
Rin says yeah, fine, it's not that much money. “If it'll get you to stop asking me to promise to buy you coffee. I'm happy to get you to shut up, any day.”
Sousuke taps the bed frame with his nails a few times and then goes back to using his fingertips. He tips his head into his shoulder. His mouth is inclined downward and Rin's not sure if that's just his neutral face or if he's actually frowning. It's never been easy to tell the difference.
“I didn't say coffee, I said soda or coffee or something,” Sousuke recalls.
Rin scoffs. “Thanks for elaborating,” he says. He checks to see if his wallet is in his pocket. It is not. He asks Sousuke where he put his wallet and Sousuke points to a chair. Seated upon said chair is Rin's gym bag. His wallet is underneath one of his sneakers. His hand comes away with a smear of dirt that he apparently neglected to wipe off of his shoe before throwing it into a bag with a pile of clothes. Gross. At least these aren't clothes he's planning on wearing again before washing them.
“Why do you lose your ID so often,” asks Rin, wiping the dirt off of his wallet with a paper tissue and dropping it into the pocket of his sweatpants. “And why don't you borrow it from someone who looks anything like you?”
“It's not 'often', this was only the second time,” says Sousuke. “I found it under your bed, by the way, so it's your fault.”
“Maybe you should keep it in your wallet, instead of your pants pocket, huh?” Rin suggests. “When you get caught I'm going to say that you stole it.”
Sousuke says “noooooo”, then he says “dooooooon't”, then he yawns into his arm and drops his head onto the bed and hits his elbow against the bed frame and groans in pain as he withdraws it from under the railing. “Doooooon't” he repeats, grimacing, cradling his elbow in his hand. “I'll get suspended or something.”
“I don't know anyone who's been suspended, how does that work in a school where we all live in dorms?” Rin wonders. Sousuke doesn't know either. But he doubts he'd be suspended over something like not using his own ID when he could easily just claim that he accidentally took his roommate's instead of his own, and how could it possibly be such a big deal that he'd actually be disciplined for it? That would be ridiculous, wouldn't it?
Rin says “yeah, I guess,” and goes to the door to leave. He forgets to put on shoes before exiting to head for the vending machines in the hallway. He doesn't have to leave the building to go to the one he's looking for so it's not a big deal, but he regrets his mistake when he steps on a pen someone dropped on the floor and almost trips. It wouldn't have hurt if he had been wearing shoes.
The refrigerated machine wears a sign that says “OUT OF ORDER”. The hot beverage dispenser has no such sign, however, so he elects to make use of that one instead of going to get shoes so he can properly search for a different machine. He buys two hot coffees and watches for small abandoned floor objects this time as he walks back to his room. The door had closed behind him but did not click shut, so he can pry it open with his toe without having to put down what he's holding. Good thing he didn't wear shoes, or that would've been harder, if not impossible.
“The soda machine was broken so I got coffee,” Rin announces. From his bed, which he is still lying in, Sousuke reaches his arm out and makes a grabby motion with his hand. Rin puts both cups down on Sousuke's desk. He punches Sousuke's hand. A very light punch. “I'm not giving you a cup while you're in bed!” he says. He punches Sousuke's hand again.
“There's enough space for me to sit up,” Sousuke claims, making no move at all to demonstrate. Instead, he yawns again, into his hand, the one that's not dangling over the edge of his bed waiting for Rin to stop punching and give it a cup instead. Rin continues to punch his hand. Sousuke gives up waiting and withdraws his arm. He gets up and slowly descends the ladder, lands softly on the floor and immediately sits down on Rin's bed. He reaches up and massages the shoulder that is attached to the arm that is attached to the hand that Rin wouldn't stop punching like some kind of asshole. Rin hands Sousuke his cup. It's warm. Sousuke thanks him. Steam rises out of the two tiny holes on the lid and it smells very strong, very bitter, very much like black coffee. Rin says “no worries” and takes a sip out of his own cup, swallows, sighs, smiles.
The tiny ovoid hole on the sippy part of the lid is not big enough for Sousuke to see clearly enough what color the liquid inside is. He wants to take the lid off to get a better look, but he needs two hands to do that and, though he's not rubbing it anymore, he doesn't want to let go of his shoulder yet. He can think of other ways to remove the lid but all of them take longer then just tasting it to confirm his suspicions. He does. His face scrunches up in distaste. It's black coffee. He was right.
“Damn it, Rin,” he says, wipes his lips as if that will somehow lessen the taste that's inside of his mouth, places the cup on the floor next to his foot. “Black coffee is disgusting,” he says.
Rin takes a long swig of his own drink, wipes his lips to stop a drip of coffee from trailing down his chin, shrugs. “Sorry, I forgot,” he says, “so I guessed you'd like it black because that's how I like it.”
“I don't understand why you'd make that guess,” Sousuke says. “Almost nobody likes coffee with nothing in it,” he says. “This tastes like tar,” he claims. “Ass-tar,” he continues. “Like how your breath smells,” he adds. Rin nudges Sousuke's ankle with his foot.
“Why do people drink coffee if they hate the taste so much that they have to add stuff to it to make it taste good,” he wonders.
“Is that why you don't like cake? You don't like the way they add stuff to flour to make it taste different? Why don't people just eat raw flour and enjoy the taste instead of fucking with it, Rin wonders.”
Rin laughs. “That's a shitty comparison and you know it,” he says. He picks up Sousuke's cup and says he's fairly certain that Ai will have some creamer cups or sugar packets or something like that somewhere in the landfill that is his room. Actually, he picked the cup up to bring it over to Ai's room but it makes more sense to leave it here, so he puts it down on Sousuke's desk, away from any feet.
“I hope so,” says Sousuke. “I waited five years for this coffee and I'm not okay with it being disgusting.”
“This doesn't fulfill the promise, you dick!” Rin yells. Sousuke laughs. Rin leaves.
Ai has a stash of sugar packets in a plastic bag in one of the secret pockets of his backpack. Rin stops himself from asking why and takes a handful of them back to his room.