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“He’s coming. I can sense him.” Suguru braced his back against the wall next to the classroom door.
“I’d focus more on that cake you're holding before you drop it,” Shoko warned Suguru from the opposite side of the door, in a corner of the room. There was a grin plastered on her wicked face, and a party horn dangling from her mouth, wedged between the backs of her teeth. In her hands was a huge bag of confetti with the top ripped wide open.
“We have a back up one for later, remember?” But Suguru still adjusted the flat of his palm underneath the birthday cake in his hand anyways. That one was reserved for a genuine celebration later.
Not that caking Gojo in his smug, pretty face wasn’t part of that celebration either.
When they heard echoes of footsteps approaching their classroom from outside the hallway, they both tensed. The sound was familiar, the clicking of their classmate’s outrageously expensive shoes against the linoleum flooring, and the long confident strides unhurried.
Suguru watched Shoko struggle to swallow a laugh back down, and he had to smile a little at that. It was a funny sight: normally cool-headed as she was most of the time, she actually very much enjoyed—
The glass window behind Suguru shattered loudly, like a bomb had just went off, and a sole body came crashing through it.
Stunned, Suguru turned around immediately. He watched as his best friend brushed off pieces of glass away from his clothes and white hair with an abnormal amount of ease that clearly suggested he’d done this before.
“What the fuck!” Shoko howled, holding her stomach with one hand as she doubled over laughing, dead on her feet.
Suguru took a step backwards and drew back the cake, taking aim. He still had one job to do. “… You jumped through the window ? Just like that?”
“Absolute amateurs, the both of you.” Gojo began with a vicious grin across his face, pointing at the both of them. “I smelled your conniving asses miles and miles away.”
“Go ahead and smell this cake up your nose instead!” Without hesitation, Suguru launched the cake right into Gojo’s face with a smile as equally deranged.
But Gojo was ready for it, and managed to catch it rather messily. He then threw the cake back at Suguru , who also caught it, and in a flash, they were down on the floor engaged in a fist fight, laughing and egging each other on. The cake had disintegrated between them, their clothes, all over the floor….
After she had calmed down, Shoko walked up to the pile of long limbs and bruised faces.
“Happy birthday, trash face,” she congratulated, dumping all of the confetti on them both from a safe distance away. The boys gagged when pieces of it flew into their mouths, even as they continued to trade shots. “Yaga-sensei’s gonna piss his pants when he comes in and sees this,” Shoko sniffed through her happy tears, pulling out her flip phone to snap pictures of them pretzeled around each other like two hissing cats covered in icing.
“... Repeat that to me again, Shoko.”
The air itself seemed to have stilled just then, and all three of them froze. Slowly, they turned their heads towards the door, where they saw their sensei standing there, his expression and posture as hard as a statue.
“A very happy birthday to you, Satoru.” Yaga uttered stonily, observing the sheer disorder around the room. Glass, confetti, and cake stains... everywhere.
Silence.
“So, um…,” Gojo croaked around Suguru’s headlock, and the boy sent him a withering look, knowing that Gojo was incapable of not having the last word in literally any situation. “You got a gift for me too, old man?”
As if he had flipped a switch, Yaga’s nostrils flared.
They both gulped simultaneously.
“Actually, I do have it with me.” He cracked his knuckles and looked at them on the floor in particular. “So why don’t I hand it to you right now?”
A half an hour later, they all ate pieces of the second cake in their seats with gusto, as if the entire incident earlier had never happened, save for the many bumps on Suguru and Gojo’s heads.
“ALL HAIL GOJO SATORU ON HIS DAY OF BIRTH!” Gojo chanted, sticking his fork in the air. Suguru hupped with him, and Shoko blew on her tongue in response. “Another slice, please!”
“You inhaled most of it already, Satoru,” Suguru told him, smiling at him.
“Oh.” Gojo patted his stomach happily, looking over Suguru’s shoulder to spy on Shoko’s slice, which she hadn’t finished.
“The three of you,” Yaga groaned, rubbing his face tiredly, “will be the death of me. I can feel it. I just know it.”
Gojo whooped loudly, and they all raised their forks in agreement to that.