Work Text:
It’s late in the afternoon when Enji finally finishes grading his papers.
He doesn’t have to look at the time to know this because his classroom always gets a few degrees colder whenever the sun sets, and even if the end of the day comes earlier this time of year, that evening chill is unmistakable. It also doesn’t hurt that the cup of coffee on his desk sweetened with too much milk and sugar for a grown man went cold hours ago.
If he looks up, he would see the way the golden rays of light dance over the students’ desks and the violet shadows reaching down to the floor beneath them and how they match the mountain on the other side of his window, already taken over by the warm hues of honey and sage.
Enji has never been someone who could be considered romantic or sentimental, but the color yellow has become something painfully wistful to him within the last few months, the change in seasons only making it worse to the point that all he sees now is amber and gold. These late nights alone in his classroom haven’t helped him at all, but he still does not let himself think about why his world has suddenly turned from it’s usual stoic and familiar gray to so many different shades of yellow and what that could mean for him.
His students did well.
Iida’s paper sits at the top of the pile without a single splash of red in sight. He always turns his exams in last, meticulously reviewing every question with an intensity that will make him exhausting as an adult. The page itself is scuffed with eraser marks, but other than that, Enji couldn’t find a single mistake.
Perfect marks.
They all did well. It’s his best year yet, he thinks, even though he would never admit it. If the students know they’ve won his approval, they’ll grow lax, and if the parents mistake Enji for someone less than stern, they’ll become demanding. Enji doesn’t have the patience for either.
He doesn’t have the patience for anything annoying right now, really.
He looks up towards the mountain and exhales. He wonders if he’s the only one left.
But of course, he is. Classes ended hours ago, and only a fool would spend the whole night grading papers at their desk instead of taking their time finishing their work at home on the weekend after a good night’s sleep.
But if he’s a fool, at least he’s one who now has the whole weekend to do whatever he wants without having to worry about which of his students has been slacking off now that the weather’s nice.
It is nice, isn’t it?
It reminds him of being young and on the track after school, running in his blue and white team uniform until the cool autumn air burned right through his lungs and had him on his knees gasping and covered in sweat, his coach just a few feet away with a stopwatch in hand.
“Good run, Todoroki.”
“Did I beat it?”
“Not yet.”
Enji stood up then and brushed the dirt off of his knees before returning to the starting line. Back then, beating the clock and proving that he was the best was all that mattered to him so all he ever saw before him was the track beneath his feet. He never noticed the mountains in the distance. Never noticed how they changed from a deep and quiet green to a blazing yellow.
It was a color that never meant much to him until recently, never needed it to.
Now it’s everywhere.
A part of him regrets the amount of time he spent running with his eyes locked in front of him because now that he’s older, he would much rather walk around in weather like this and admire the world around him than chase somebody else’s record.
He could almost laugh at himself. He, Todoroki Enji, a man who yearns for long walks in nice weather. He couldn’t get more ridiculous if he tried.
It’s too late in the afternoon for that anyway.
He’ll pack up the rest of his papers, make a beeline for his car, and go home for a nice bowl of reheated stew that Fuyumi left in his refrigerator (thanks to the picture of the container she sent him a few hours ago). He’ll take a hot bath and then go to bed early because he finished the work he needed to do, and that’ll be it. No surprises, no time for sentimental leisure, just a tired man going home alone after a long week with a nice backdrop.
He should probably get going.
Enji cleans up his desk, puts the papers he graded back in his drawer to hand out Monday, and he grabs the notes he needs to make his class’s next quiz on what they’ve learned so far this month. He has no doubt they’ll all pass so he makes a mental note to make it just a little bit harder this time.
It will go well with his reheated stew in his nice empty home tonight.
He shakes the thought away and grabs the satchel he carries with him and his travel mug off of the desk and heads out, once again the last person on campus.
Or so he thinks.
It’s not quite dark yet when he finally exits the building. The world has taken on a cold navy glow only offset by the tawny and gold leaves that have blown over onto the walkway. They crunch beneath his feet, and a sudden gust of wind blows a few more his way, cutting through his sweater vest like a knife. Enji’s blood may burn hot, but he’s never been strong against the cold.
He’s not the only one.
On the edge of campus next to one of the concrete pillars some of the school delinquents loiter around between classes is a younger man with wild blonde hair, a thick brown hide jacket, and a pair of slacks that don’t quite reach his ankles—or cover his chicken-printed socks. (Enji thinks he might get his pants from the childrens’ section based on his already unfortunate stature, but it would be improper of him to ask).
He shouldn’t be surprised that he would still be here. The art teacher who keeps painting yellow all over Enji’s life.
He huffs immediately once he spots him. He knows that as soon as they meet, he can expect to either be bothered, teased, or flat out annoyed, but a part of him can’t help but be relieved that he’s still here, even hours after he should have gone home. The boyish little ember in the back of his mind that wants to see Takami more than a coworker should is something he’s fought hard to snuff out with no success at all.
It’s ridiculous. He’s far too old and far too divorced with several adult children to be experiencing what Fuyumi calls butterflies, and yet the enthusiastic wave aimed in his direction does something to his stomach that surely only wings could do.
“Todoroki!”
Enji has no choice but to continue towards him if he wants to get to his car (which he does), but he hates the way this looks like he’s approaching him on purpose. Like Takami was waiting for him. Like this is something they do after school. What if someone sees and makes assumptions?
There’s no one else here, he reminds himself. Everyone else has gone home already.
He’s allowed to talk to his fellow teachers after school. He’s not breaking any rules. He’s not crossing any lines.
Takami shoves his hands back in his pockets and shivers against the crisp autumn air. Enji can’t blame him for being cold, but he does blame him for being out here in it if he’s this uncomfortable. Whatever reason he’s out here at all is none of his business, though, that’s for sure.
Enji regards him with a quick wordless grunt before continuing on his way with no need for polite goodbyes. He’s always found them unnecessary and prefers it when he doesn’t have to wish people their good weekends or good evenings when he doesn’t care one way or another. So what if it’s rude? Takami won’t have the chance to knock him off his feet if Enji doesn’t give it to him.
But when he marched by and celebrated his small childish victory from successfully ignoring another man, he did not expect Takami to follow him—although he’s not exactly surprised that he did.
“Anyone ever tell you you might be a workaholic,” he says over brisk steps to keep up with Enji’s longer stride.
“Often.”
Takami laughs like it was a joke, and Enji tries not to picture the warmth of his cheeks he knows is there. He doesn’t turn back to look either. He doesn’t need to see it.
“Your students are so lucky they get all of your attention.”
Enji does turn back at that, furrowing his brow in mild irritation, but all Takami does is laugh again, always at his expense like a bird chirping too early in the morning.
“Did you need something,” Enji frowns.
“Can’t a guy just stand around all afternoon looking cool and mysterious for no reason? Must I have motives?”
Enji doesn’t respond, and Takami’s face drops into a softer smile of defeat, a small admission, and Enji relaxes. He’s not a complete monster.
“Okay, maybe.”
Enji raises an eyebrow, his patience thinning, but he still waits for Takami to explain himself, or plead, rather, in that way that makes Enji’s teeth hurt.
“Could you give me a ride home?” Takami asks through a pained grin, tucking his hands into his sleeves. Enji doesn’t exactly have a reason to say no, but it’s more about the part where he’s often toyed with that he doesn’t like. This favor, however, seems hardly suspect. “My bike has a flat tire, and I live on the other side of the mountain.”
“I see,” Enji nods. He turns to continue towards the parking lot with Takami on his heels.
“Is that a yes?”
Enji hoists the bicycle into the back of his car. Takami wasn’t lying about it being unusable, but calling his tire flat might have been an understatement, because Enji isn’t sure he’s ever seen the rubber hang off of the wheel like this before.
He suspects it was slashed, but he can’t see what kind of student would be angry enough to go after an art teacher’s tire like this when his classes are all electives and he’s not exactly one of the more difficult faculty members at the school.
Takami doesn’t provide any helpful information, though. He swears while crossing his heart that all of his students are just a bunch of baby chicks with paint brushes, whatever that means. Enji will have to ask around later in case one of his nosier students knows something to get to the bottom of it, and he will get to the bottom of it, because he will not have his school turn into a playground for troublemakers on his watch. His favorite son goes here, for goodness sake.
“I probably rode over a nail on my way in,” he shrugs, hunched away from the blistering wind. “Maybe some broken glass. You know how it is.”
Enji hums and slams the trunk shut. He does not know “how it is” considering the fact that he’s driven this exact same car since Touya was born, but he doesn’t comment either way.
He gets into the car without a word, and Takami joins him on the passenger’s side with a shiver as he settles in, rubbing his blistered hands together like he was standing in a blizzard all afternoon and not a moderate breeze. How he’ll handle biking himself around during the winter, Enji will never know.
He silently turns the heat on in the car for him, mostly so Takami doesn’t complain about being cold the whole way to his house, and it seems to soothe him enough that Enji thinks that this will be a mostly silent car ride.
Wrong.
Takami doesn’t stop talking from the moment they pull out onto the street. He doesn’t seem interested in slowing down either now that he’s started.
Enji might regret willingly letting himself be trapped in a moving vehicle with him.
He talks about his students first, about the boy who draws nothing but Sailor Moon characters and the girl who found out the hard way that she’s partially colorblind. He asks Enji a million questions about his own classes, and after years of being casually asked about work at the dinner table as a nicety, he doesn’t expect his answers to mean much either way.
It takes him by surprise when Takami starts rattling off information about the period Enji is teaching this semester. He mostly talks about art, folklore, architecture, and other things Enji’s class doesn’t cover considering the curriculum is more centered around war and politics, but Takami isn’t deterred at all by the difference.
Enji listens to him quietly, eyes focused on the road ahead while Takami explains why different inks and pigments used a thousand years ago are still historically relevant, weaving in the very same trade routes and treaties listed in Enji’s notes in his bag in the back seat. All of this feels like new information but, at the same time, it’s all things he already knew but had long forgotten. It’s refreshing.
“How do you know all of this?”
“Huh?” Takami turns towards him, blinking out of his endless train of thought. “Oh! I did my Master’s thesis on it, sorry. Haha, didn’t mean to nerd out there. You’d think I’d be sick of it by now, but something about that time period makes my brain go nuts.”
He laughs awkwardly, but Enji doesn’t understand what there is to laugh about.
“I guess I never mentioned before that I didn't get into education on purpose,” he explains. “I mean, okay, so long story short, I was gonna do the whole badass art historian slash yonder years aficionado thing, but the job I wanted was at a university on the other side of the country, and it was, like, the best I could do with my degree, right? Dream job and all that.
“But they wanted teachers, right? Not just researchers who know too much sometimes, but like people who wouldn’t piss off the alumni association or the stinky old department dudes with tenure, and I mean, Professor Takami Keigo does have a nice ring to it, but it turns out I was missing a few super important teeny weenie qualifications for that, and as you know, you can’t just be a professor just because you know a lot about the subject, there are rules and things.
“A few phone calls and a promise to sing at my old mentor’s daughter’s wedding later, I end up with a teaching job here, but like, I’m also not a teacher, like I didn’t get the right degree for it, but since art is technically a club and not a regular class, the school was okay with it, and I learned that I actually really like teaching kids how to keep this oil paints from exploding. Who’da thought?”
“I see,” Enji nods with a slight frown. “So this is temporary, then.”
“I don’t think so.”
Enji glances at him out of the corner of his eye.
“I love this job,” he smiles warmly, honest. “The pay is enough to keep my roommate from kicking me out, and I love the kids. I think it’s okay when plans derail a little bit, you know? Maybe I wouldn’t like working in a place where they’d expect me to whisper all the time.”
“No, I don’t believe you would enjoy that at all.”
Takami throws his head back and roars. “I didn’t know you could joke, Todoroki.”
But Enji wasn’t joking. He can’t see Takami living his life caged away in a museum or locked up in a library.
Lately when the sun is out, Enji often sees him through his classroom window making his students draw the mountains in the distance, enjoying the open air without shame or concern for anyone who might see him. Sometimes he turns around and waves like he can see him watching. Enji has almost waved back.
“You are a teacher,” he says. “You may not have the same qualifications as the rest of us, but you’re devoted to your students, and I’m sure the knowledge about avoiding small explosions will be invaluable to most of them.”
“A joke and a compliment? Is it my birthday, Todoroki,” he asks too softly, and that's when Enji realizes he’s being stared at, more than just casually, and it’s a fondness he isn’t used to. Butterflies swirl quietly in Enji’s stomach like leaves scattered away by his car tires, and he thinks that maybe he should have gone home earlier today. Alone. “You like beer?”
“I have to drive.”
“Oh, right.”
In hindsight, Enji should have seen this coming. He should have known the moment Takami Keigo —who swings by his classroom too often for someone who works on the other side of the school and who insists that they have lunch together at least three times a week—got into his car that the ride home wouldn’t be so simple.
He should have known the second he mentioned it that Enji would eventually pull over somewhere in town to feed him because that’s what he does apparently.
He looks out for this person’s well-being despite himself, and tonight that means driving him home and stopping at a little restaurant on the way home and buying him dinner.
Takami talks with busy chopsticks in hands as he shovels in the rest of his second serving of squid into his mouth, and Enji can barely keep up, both with the food and the conversation. He nurses a cup of hot tea while Takami talks about everything on his mind at once, a stark contrast from his quiet table at home. Surprisingly, he doesn’t mind so much.
He spent the last forty something years eating in silence only to have that routine completely shattered by this one person who talks like he’s been waiting his whole life to have someone listen to him.
“Can you draw?”
“Hmm?” Takami blinks, sitting up straight. “Oh, yeah, of course! Like I’m no Picasso, but I do know my way around a color wheel.”
Without being asked he grabs a small paper napkin off of the table and a pen from pocket and starts to scribble away like he’s been given the most important task in the world.
He finishes his drawing and slides it towards Enji over a small puddle of condensation from his own beer bottle. It smears the edges, but the drawing is still legible enough to catch him by surprise.
Enji looks down at it and blinks.
“It’s a cow,” Takami informs him.
“Yes, I can see that.”
He looks at the spotted cow Takami drew and wonders how in the world this was what first came to mind when prompted to prove his qualifications as art teacher. A little person, he could see. He could even believe that Takami would default to drawing a chicken based on his gaudy and horrendous taste in socks, but a cow?
“I thought it would be moo-ving.”
Enji exhales so hard he swears he feels steam come out of his nose.
“Takami.”
“Keigo,” he corrects with a smile. “We’re not at school anymore.”
His mood tempers out almost immediately, and he brings his drink back to his lips to keep hands from giving him away. “Takami is fine, even here.”
Takami sighs and slouches over onto his elbow. “So serious, Todoroki.”
“I have children your age.”
It slips out, really, a reminder to himself that he has to stay professional with this person. That they can’t get close or be friends, and that they cannot, under any circumstances, become familiar. Takami is too young to understand, too carefree. Enji can’t let himself be influenced.
“Yes, Touya and Fuyumi,” Takami recalls, and Enji’s eyes widen, surprised that he remembers their names. “Natsuo is a gray area, because I mean, kinda, but I did teach your youngest son last year, which puts your whole argument up in flames.”
“How so?”
“Because that means we’re both respectable teachers at the same school,” he says with a flicker to his eyes. “Coworkers, even.”
“Well yes, but–.”
“Doesn’t that make it a little dangerous,” he asks in a hushed tone before wrinkling his nose and chasing his own thought away. “Don’t mind me, it’s the beer talking. But yes, I’m roughly the same age as two of your children, if it matters.”
“It does.”
It does.
It does.
Takami’s mouth twitches almost like he can hear Enji trying to convince himself. How annoying.
“Alright,” he smiles.
Enji waits, suspicious and unsure. “Is that it?”
“Consider me too smart to try to convince a stubborn man to live a little when I still need him to take me home tonight.”
“I see,” Enji frowns.
“I’m not giving up, you know,” he says, resting his chin back on his hand. “You’d miss me too much.”
Enji huffs and looks off. “Ridiculous boy.”
“Oh, so you always give your lectures by the window for no reason then?”
He looks back at Takami’s knowing, playful smirk with a harsh glare.
“Nice view, isn’t it,” he adds.
“Indeed,” he grits.
“Tell me, Todoroki, what do you like about it?”
Enji exhales into his cup and concedes. It doesn’t matter what he says or how hard he deflects or warns, Takami always manages to spin him around in the direction he wants. It’s infuriating as much as it isn’t, and maybe tonight he’s too tired and too full from the meal and the conversation to fight back anymore.
“The colors, I guess.”
Amber eyes flash, haloed by a mop of gold hair, and it makes his chest tighten.
“Me too,” Takami says with a smile. “Red is my favorite color, you know.”
Enji swallows, his blood running hot up his neck as he sees the true meaning of his words dance over Takami’s face like this is just a game to him. One that he’s winning.
He doesn’t know a way out this time.
“Well,” Takami says suddenly, pulling Enji out of the deep fog the conversation left him in. What did he first ask, exactly? Enji can’t quite remember. Something about changing seasons, maybe. Something about being too young, probably. Something about where Enji looks when he’s supposed to be paying attention. “Thanks for the dinner.”
“Oh, right,” he sits up. “It’s no problem.”
Takami turns and waves towards the waiter with a bright honeyed smile he only reserves for people who don’t know him, and before Enji can protest, he’s already flashing his credit card around like this was his intention all along.
“I was going to pay.”
“I said I’d buy you a beer,” he shrugs.
“You did not, you asked if I liked beer.”
Takami doesn’t drop his smile. “It was implied, wasn’t it?”
“Then say what you mean next time.”
He sucks his teeth and waves. “No, that wouldn’t be fun at all. I’d ask you out for drinks, you’d say no, and then I’d have to spend my whole night licking my wounds and watching trash tv to make myself feel better. This way I get exactly what I want.”
Enji scowls, but he doesn’t say anything.
It’s been like this between them all year. Some might call Takami’s persistence relentless, and Enji could say he’s used to it by now, already adjusted to the fact that he’s a ridiculous flirt who probably weaves his way through the different departments for sport, or attention, or whatever it is younger men like him want.
Unfortunately though, he knows it isn’t true, and for that reason, he’ll never get used to it.
Takami's interest in him is, as far as he can tell, exclusive, and for the life of him, he’ll never understand it. He was married once, sure, but it was something he did right after college because it was what was expected of him. Rei was amicable, but he always suspected that their union was adequate, if not unsatisfying.
Enji knows how it feels to watch someone fall out of love with him. He’s used to it in the way he’s used to eating alone and staying late to grade papers rather than going home, but this though, whatever it is, is completely uncharted territory.
“We should come here again sometime,” Takami says. “My treat.”
“Absolutely not.”
Takami pales, and it’s an honest display of his feelings sinking into the pit of his stomach without a chance to hide them away from Enji.
“I will pay for dinner from now on,” Enji says, and Takami instantly brightens back up.
“Come on, Todoroki! Let a guy say thanks for taking him home in a pinch. I’ve got my pride to look after,” he laughs, delighted.
“Enji.”
Takami’s cheeks rust as he curls his fists into balls just beneath the hem of his sleeves. It feels like a victory, even if it isn’t. Even if it isn’t the most foolish decision he’s ever made.
“Enji,” he repeats. “Tell me. What color do you like?”
“Yellow,” Enji manages.
“Which one?”
“All of them.”