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Yaku checked the apartment number was correct before ringing the doorbell. He kept his phone at hand, other hand in his jacket pocket on the chilly Saturday afternoon, his breath misting in front of him. The apartment’s resident pranced gleefully to the door.
When Yaku beheld the owner, his eyeline met the significantly taller boy’s shoulders.
“Yaku-san!” Lev cheerfully gleamed. “You made it!”
“Yeah, of course I made it,” Morisuke Yaku pouted. “You gonna let me in?”
So excited to have guests, Lev realized he had forgotten his manners. Morisuke hung up his scarf and jacket next to the home security panel in the entryway and shivered off the chill.
The apartment boasted three bedrooms, a kitchen, and two baths (one for his parents, one shared by Lev and Alisa). It felt eerily vacant with Lev being the only family member home though.
The owner guided Yaku to his bedroom. He tossed an abandoned shirt onto an overflowing pile of laundry. Empty takeaway containers littered the floor, and one light bulb was out. Yaku didn’t know if Lev always kept the room in this state or if he only let it go to pot since his parents weren’t around.
“You live like a pig,” Yaku judged.
Far from being offended, Lev abnormally treated the slight as a sage’s wisdom and clapped his hands together in reverent gratitude.
“Please, Yaku-san! Teach me how to live good!”
Yaku folded his arms primly. “Can’t teach you life skills. Where’s your textbook?” After all, Morisuke Yaku was here to tutor Lev for his English test if he wanted to join them at nationals in a couple of weeks.
Lev had first asked—begged, even—Kuroo to do it, but the captain claimed he had a prior engagement and cheekily nominated Yaku. Yaku knew Kuroo’s excuse was BS. Lev jumped with joy regardless, and thus, Yaku ended up here.
“Thanks for this, Yaku-san,” Lev blushed.
“Yeah, yeah, let’s just get started,” Yaku dismissed.
In short order, the third-year realized just how bad the situation was: Lev’s understanding of English was as bad as his understanding of cats.
“Look! Where are your Russian genes?! How can you suck at other languages so bad?!” he yelled, as if being biracial automatically made a person linguistically savvy. Lev stretched across the table so languidly it pissed Yaku off to see how grotesquely long he was.
“It’s just hard,” Lev whined before a completely unrelated idea popped into his head. “Hey. You want sharlotka?”
“A what now?”
“Sharlotka. Hold on. Lemme get it.” He returned from the fridge with two small plates of leftovers of a blond doughy concoction, apple chunks poking out. Yaku siphoned off a piece with a fork and felt bliss after putting it in his mouth.
“Hey. This is good.”
“I know, right?!” Lev grinned brightly. They scarfed down the cake with a side of tea.
“Yaku-san, thanks for coming over,” Lev said after a while. “I…don’t usually have friends over….”
“Why not?” shrugged his guest.
Lev blushed deeply. “My dad….”
The taller boy tried to explain in a way that didn’t reflect badly on his father. Lev’s dad seemed paranoid about strangers; and though he’d never said he didn’t trust Lev’s peers, the boy nonetheless felt awkward at the thought of bringing around people his dad didn’t know. Yaku sensed the Haiba patriarch was incredibly protective of the family’s safety and peered at the security panel on the wall, which actually wasn’t turned on at this moment.
“Your dad worried about something?”
Assuming Yaku was specifically referring to the security system, Lev smiled. “Oh, I never turn that on.”
“Let me guess. You forgot the code.”
Lev jolted with amazement. “How did you know?”
Morisuke sighed.
They tried some more problems. And several shouting sessions later, at last progress began to be made, and Lev for the first time translated a phrase to English perfectly.
“No, that’s wron—” Yaku began on reflex before checking himself. “Oh, wait. Hah. You actually got one.”
Just this one tiny victory was enough to make Lev cheer jubilantly at his success.
“It’s all because of you, Yaku-san!” The excessive thanks was exasperating, but before Yaku could speak up, Lev continued. “No one at school wants to help me because I’m dumb.”
“You are not dumb,” Yaku refuted. “Dumb people don’t pick up volleyball as fast as you did.”
“Really? Did you pick up volleyball fast?”
“Course,” he embellished, pretending there hadn’t been years of effort to become skilled.
“You’re so cool, Yaku-san.”
Yaku blushed.
“Hey, um, can you show me how to plant my feet for a receive properly again?” Lev, his mind now on volleyball, said.
At practice, Yaku would have screeched “Again?!” for all to hear, but here, in such a private setting, he laughed it off with:
“Sure. Why not?”
He demonstrated first and then guided Lev’s positioning from behind, manually adjusting the taller boy’s limbs as necessary.
“Hey, I got it!” Lev screamed when he replicated the pose himself.
“Yeah, yeah. Wait until you’re on the court before you get so excited.”
“Thanks for always looking out for me, Yaku-san.”
The compliments were beginning to wear. In his head, he could hear Kuroo mocking him for ruining his “Demon-senpai” reputation. He loathed the moniker, but at the same time he did like how cool it sounded.
As much as Lev got on his nerves, as much as Lev had to be told two, three, or four times before he got something, the boy was a dutiful pupil. Yaku appreciated that. It made Yaku himself feel accomplished whenever Lev pulled off something he couldn’t before. And he couldn’t deny it felt nice having someone look up to you so strongly.
“Hey. I have to look out for you. You’re my kouhai,” Yaku answered with faux humility.
An ornate cuckoo clock, imported from Russia, crowed 11 p.m. Yaku checked his phone to confirm the time and yawned.
“Better go so I can make the train,” he stretched.
“You can stay here! My dad didn’t say I couldn’t have guests overnight.”
At that, Yaku wondered whether Lev’s dad said he could have guests, period.
Having crawled into Lev’s sleeping bag from age 12 (which Lev tactlessly said was “just Yaku’s size”), Morisuke pondered the dark ceiling. The first-year passed out almost instantly on the adjacent bed. Yaku guessed his host must be used to the tea, because Yaku’s body felt quite awake after the caffeine.
Morisuke wondered about the Haiba family. His sister Alisa was the cutest thing ever, but what were his parents like? His dad ran some kind of manufacturing firm and was on a business trip to Russia with his wife and Alisa. Lev would have gone too if not for the volleyball club. Although anxious, they let him stay behind.
Yaku wondered what Lev’s dad could be paranoid about.
He yawned again. Hearing Lev peacefully inhale and exhale, almost as softly as a snuggled cat, he rolled over and closed his eyes, hoping to will himself to sleep soon.
A little after midnight, the front door opened. Yaku still hadn’t quite fallen asleep yet. Hearing noises from the hallway outside, his brain nervously conjured the image of Lev’s dad harassing his son for having overnight guests. Sensing the late-night arrivals had stopped outside the bedroom door, Morisuke shook Lev awake.
“Hey. I think your parents are home.”
“Wha?” Lev drawled.
The door opened. The hall light had been flipped on. Yaku couldn’t make out the silhouettes of the two figures who appeared in the doorway.
A flashlight’s beam aimed at Lev. Then the flashlight holder spotted Yaku sitting on the floor beside the bed and exclaimed something in Russian.
Instantly the two male figures charged aggressively into the room, and Yaku finally realized they weren’t Lev’s parents.
One of them clawed Lev off of the bed and dragged him into the hallway. The other sprinted towards Yaku and did the same. Leather gloves covered the mouths of both boys to silence any screams.
A third person stood by in the hall with rope. He bound Lev’s wrists so hard he thought his blood flow was being blocked. The man holding Yaku kneeled down and kept his hostage tightly in his grasp, both of them watching the Haiba heir’s securement.
Ignoring the taste of the leather, Yaku squirmed enough to wrap his teeth over one finger of his captor’s glove. The bite barely made it to the skin, and in response the man irately body slammed Morisuke onto the hallway floor.
And then, Yaku felt something razor-sharp jab into his neck.
Lev’s eyes widened as he beheld the person holding the tip of a knife to the underside of his senpai’s jaw.
“Move, and he dies,” Yaku’s captor warned Lev with a Russian accent and callous eyes.
Lev’s heart pounded. His eyes poured out tears. He let his body go limp, hoping that submission would let his senpai go free.
Yaku shook with fear seeing Lev allow himself to be blindfolded and gagged.
“Shall I kill this one?” the man holding Yaku asked after his two cohorts hoisted Lev to his feet. The words caused Lev to struggle and moan around the gag, but one of the men punched him across the skull to make him behave.
“No! No blood!” the man then rebuked his comrade. “They won’t cooperate if there’s blood. Leave him.”
The man forced Yaku’s skull to the floor and leaned close to his ear.
“Y’hear that?” Yaku’s captor whispered gruffly. “You’re lucky.”
In a fell swoop he put away the knife, tugged Yaku back into the bedroom, and tossed his captive like a pillow. Before Yaku could even think of doing anything, the man delivered a kick so severe to Morisuke’s gut it expelled every drop of oxygen from his lungs.
Leaving the third-year in a choking mess, he slammed the bedroom door on his way out.
Yaku refused to see it end like this. Lev looked up to him. He carried so much respect for his senpai. He couldn’t let his kouhai down.
Coughing up a lung (if not literally), Yaku crawled to the door and achingly reached for the knob. After twisting it, he used the limpness of his body to pull the door open.
Dragging himself along the floorboards, he saw Lev and his abductors on the landing outside the front door, paying Yaku no mind.
“Lev,” Yaku croaked, with the little air in his lungs, reaching a hand futilely toward his kouhai.
The kidnappers shut the front door. Yaku stopped crawling and burst into tears.
The ransom demand arrived by phone the next day: 25,000,000 yen from the head of Haiba Industries in exchange for the proprietor’s son.
Police interviewed Yaku. Amidst all the chaos, he didn’t recall any helpful details about the attackers, what they looked like, or what they were wearing. The police recommended he get counseling.
His classmates tried to console him and tell him it wasn’t Yaku’s fault. Even Kuroo was being uncharacteristically sympathetic.
Sometimes, amidst the flashbacks to that horrific night, Morisuke Yaku cried as much as Lev’s own family….