Chapter Text
There are many blessings in Miyuki Kazuya’s life, and it would be a shame to feel bad about it. He has the opportunity to attend Seidou High. He’s a starter on the baseball team. He has great teammates. He has Sawamura Eijun: his boyfriend and battery partner, keeper of his heart, fearless ace, badass pitcher, fantastic kisser—
Ahem.
All this just to say: he doesn’t have much to complain about. He has a roof over his head, food to eat, and the opportunity to pursue his passion. Seriously, Miyuki is grateful for a great many things.
But he is not grateful for his roommates.
“Hey.”
Miyuki looks up from where he’s twirling his pen around his fingers. They’re in between classes right now, so he’s killing time while they wait for their history teacher to show up.
A short distance away, Kuramochi leans against the stretch of wall by the eastern window. His mouth is twisted into a thoughtful frown, and he squints at Miyuki, not with suspicion, but curiosity.
“What?”
“Isn’t your room a little improbable?”
Miyuki’s pen clatters onto his desk, and he reaches up to rub his temples. “Oh, boy.”
“Three catchers in one room,” Kuramochi muses. “Isn’t that weird? What are the chances, you know?”
“I wish they were lower.” Miyuki slumps down into his chair and sighs. “Akira and Okumura don’t get along.”
Kuramochi’s eyes widen. “Really? They seem exactly the same.”
Miyuki twists his mouth. "Where did you get that idea?"
“Isn’t it obvious?” Kuramochi raises a hand and starts counting off on his fingers. “They’re both kind of quiet. Sarcastic. Blunt to the point of stupidity. Obsessed with Eijun. Of course, the same could be said about you—”
“Excuse me?”
“—but anyway, I don’t see why they don’t get along when they’re practically the same person.”
“That’s probably why they don’t get along.” Miyuki grimaces. “They hated each other on sight.”
He remembers it like it was yesterday. It was a simple Thursday night, with first-years rushing up and down the stairs hauling boxes and duffle bags, and then, amidst the chaos, someone rapped upon their dorm room door. Akira, who had been itching for someone new to annoy, nearly kicked down the door in his efforts to greet their new roommate.
Climate change is real. But Miyuki swears the world lost at least twenty degrees worth of temperature when Akira and Okumura locked eyes.
“… You’re not a pitcher,” Akira had said.
“You’re not, either,” Okumura fired back.
“Same here,” Miyuki chimed in, just to feel included.
But neither of them deigned to acknowledge their captain. Instead, they glared at each other for an unnecessary length of time.
Akira turned away first, but only because Miyuki texted Eijun to text Akira so that he’d check his phone.
“… And I’ve been living in a passive-aggressive hellscape ever since,” Miyuki complains.
Kuramochi cackles. “Does Akira mess with his alarms?”
Miyuki shivers, remembering that short period of time living under the weight of Akira’s silent wrath. “No, nothing that annoying,” he admits. “But—do you remember what it was like when Zono and Asou kept trying to one-up each other? Constantly?”
Kuramochi winces. “Yikes. That sucks.”
“Eh, I can live with it,” Miyuki says. “Don’t get me wrong. It’s annoying. But it’s tolerable, and it’s not like they have to be best friends or whatever. And it doesn’t affect how they play, so it’s none of my business.”
Four hours later, when Miyuki and his boyfriend are making out behind the bleachers on Field B, Eijun pulls back for a breath and blinks at him.
“Kazuya!” he says, eyes wide and soulful. His lips are bitten red and raw, his hair is sticking up, his breath comes out in needy little gasps. Miyuki is prepared to hand him the world on a silver platter.
“Can you help Aki out with Okumura?”
Miyuki would rather sing karaoke.
Eijun turns the puppy-dog eyes to full blast. His golden eyes water with crocodile tears, darkening his unfairly long eyelashes, and he sticks out his lower lip in a pathetic pout. Miyuki can feel his defenses crumble in real-time.
This is so unfair. Why can’t he be asexual and indifferent, like Akira? Why does he have to be so incredibly gay for his boyfriend?
“Aki’s my twin, and you’re my boyfriend,” Eijun explains. “His business is my business is your business. It’s the transitive property of equality!”
“Never bring up math while we’re doing this again,” Miyuki tells him.
Miyuki’s been on decent terms with Akira ever since the Fall Tournament finals. Sure, he’s no Nori-senpai, but they have come to an understanding. They are rivals on the field and friendly acquaintances everywhere else.
Miyuki likes to think of it this way: if he had to choose someone to go to a concert with, and for some reason Eijun and Mei and Kuramochi were unavailable, he might invite Akira instead. They can carry a conversation without it getting awkward. Akira introduces Miyuki to bands that are not indie rock from the nineties. Miyuki helps Akira with his math homework. Sometimes, they even play two-person poker.
The same cannot be said for Okumura, but it’s not like it’s a requirement for roommates to be friends. Okumura is generally respectful, and unlike Akira, he always remembers his room keys. One time, Miyuki dropped a flashcard set that he’d borrowed from Nabe, and Okumura helped him pick them all up. They’re good.
Akira and Okumura, though? Every other sentence is a paper cut with those two. It’s like they’re speaking their own language, except their language is designed for combat. The second they enter a three-meter radius of each other, they devolve into some primal state of aggression. Miyuki thinks it’s hilarious, except for the fact that he lives with them.
They don’t fight, though. Not really. There’s a difference between being annoyed and being angry, and he’s fairly certain that the tension between Akira and Okumura comes entirely from being two competitive catchers fighting for the starting position.
But Eijun asked, so Miyuki braces himself for the stupidity and prepares to get involved.
He starts with Akira, if only because he knows Akira better. It’s pretty easy to find him, too—if he’s not on the field, he’s with Furuya, and if he’s not with Furuya, he’s with Eijun. Usually, it’s all three at once.
Miyuki finds the first-years—wait, no, second-years —at the batting cages. Haruichi is helping Eijun with proper positioning, and Furuya’s spotting for Kanemaru in the next lane over. Akira and Toujou are sitting on a nearby bench for a water break, though it’s less of a break and more of a friendly debate on the pronunciation of various English phrases.
Target acquired. Miyuki strolls over.
“Hey, cap,” Toujou greets as he approaches.
“Hi,” Miyuki replies. “Can I borrow my roommate for a sec?”
Akira immediately frowns, and Miyuki lifts his hands up in surrender.
“It’ll be quick,” Miyuki assures him. “I promise you can get back to arguing over how to say jife later.”
Toujou chokes, warring between respect for his elders and outrage at Miyuki’s atrocious pronunciation. While Toujou’s distracted, Miyuki pulls a spluttering Akira aside, far enough that they’re out of earshot of the batting cages.
“What the hell is jife?” Akira demands. “It’s either jif or gif—jife isn’t even an option!”
“Irrelevant.” Miyuki waves it off. “Eijun is concerned about your negative relationship with Okumura, and it’s affecting my love life. Please reassure your brother.”
Akira gags. “Stop talking to me about your love life!”
“Stop being relevant to it, then!”
“Look, if Okumura and I are getting along—”
Getting along. Good one.
“—then that’s our business, not Eijun’s. So why are you even here?”
“I asked that same question,” Miyuki mutters. Transitive property! is still rattling around his skull like a brick in a washing machine: loud, distracting, and definitely not supposed to be there.
“You’d think he’s never heard banter before,” Akira grumbles.
At that, Miyuki pauses.
Akira blinks at him, oblivious. “What?”
“Akira.” Miyuki puts his hands on Akira’s shoulders. “Banter is what you do with me and your brother. Banter is what you do with Furuya. What you do with Okumura is psychological warfare.”
Akira makes a face. Hopefully, that means that something has gotten through his thick skull.
“At the very least,” Miyuki says. “Don’t do your ‘banter’ in front of Eijun. Or in our room, for that matter. The atmosphere of hatred is physically painful.”
“Weak,” Akira says, but he sighs and brushes Miyuki’s hands off his shoulders. “Fine, whatever. Is that all?”
“That’s all.” Miyuki nods and steps back, satisfied. “You can go back to your jife debate now.”
“It’s pronounced jif,” Akira tells him, and he turns around without looking back.
Three days later, Eijun corners Miyuki in the hallways at school, distressed.
“It’s worse,” he frets.
“Ahhhh,” Miyuki says, running a hand through his hair.
Okay! Obviously, talking to Akira solved nothing. This is a shame, because talking to Okumura is…
Well, it’s not bad. It’s just unsettling. There’s a quiet kind of violence in Okumura’s eyes. For all his respectful Miyuki-senpai’s and decent roommate habits, for all his willingness to listen and pull his weight, there’s a slippery sort of quality to him. It’s easy to read his moods and impossible to understand him.
Okumura is an open book, but the book is collegiate-level.
But Miyuki thinks he knows enough. Okumura is a typical catcher: analytical and observant with the streak of controlled insanity associated with the people who volunteer for baseball’s most dangerous position. He’s a smart kid with a blunt instrument of a tongue. Because of this, he mostly keeps to himself—with the exception of Seto “Taku” Takuma, who lives next door.
So after dinner, Miyuki heads over to room 204 and knocks. It only takes a short moment for the door to open up.
“Hey, what’s up— Miyuki-senpai!”
Miyuki winces at the volume of Kanemaru’s startled shriek. “Uh, hello,” he says, and he lifts up his hand in an awkward wave.
Kanemaru turns deathly pale, but he leans an arm against his doorway in a painfully forced attempt to act natural. “W-what are you doing here?” he asks, voice one octave too high.
Miyuki frowns. Kanemaru normally isn’t so skittish. “I’m looking for someone.”
A bead of sweat drops down Kanemaru’s forehead.
Miyuki opens his mouth.
“I swear that I warned him,” Kanemaru blurts out, before Miyuki can ask his question. “Oh, god. He’s just a first-year, please have pity on him, I promise he can be a good kid—”
“What?” Miyuki shoots Kanemaru an alarmed expression. “No one’s in trouble, I just needed to ask a question. What are you talking about?”
Kanemaru stares at him. Miyuki stares back.
“Nothing,” Kanemaru says, after two seconds too long. “My roommate is a law-abiding citizen.”
Miyuki wonders if he should switch gears and figure out what sort of illegal activities Seto Takuma is up to. Then he decides that he’s better off not knowing. Plausible deniability and all that.
“Is Okumura here?”
Kanemaru exhales, and the tension in his shoulders melts away. He nods and looks over his shoulder. “Oi, Okumura. Your roommate’s looking for you.”
Okumura pokes his head up from where he and Seto are playing Mushroom Wars. Seto dutifully pauses the game, and Okumura walks over to the door.
“It’ll be quick,” Miyuki tells him, gesturing for him to step outside. Okumura follows, and Kanemaru closes the door to give them some illusion of privacy.
“Something wrong?” Okumura asks, blinking at Miyuki with the subtle disdain of an uppity first-year.
Miyuki clasps his hands together. “Please do a better job of getting along with Akira.”
“Who?”
Miyuki resists the urge to bash his head against the wall. “Sawamura Akira? Our roommate?”
“Oh, him,” Okumura says, dripping vitriol and violence.
Well, that’s not a good sign.
“Look, you don’t need to like him,” Miyuki says. “Just, this is starting to affect my personal life, so—”
“You should be talking to him, then,” Okumura hisses. “He’s the one being an obnoxious asshole. I can’t believe he’s related to Sawamura-senpai.”
“Sawamura-senpai—you mean Eijun?”
Okumura nods. His eyes light up, even if the rest of his face remains fixed in that stoic scowl of his, and Kuramochi’s commentary comes filtering back into Miyuki’s brain.
Obsessed with Eijun.
“Speaking of my boyfriend,” Miyuki says, making sure to emphasize those last two words, “he’s worried about how you and Akira are getting along. So if you could at least pretend to be nice in front of Eijun—”
“I’m not a liar,” Okumura fires back. “Not like that idiot roommate of ours. He knows exactly what he’s doing, that manipulative bastard.”
Miyuki raises his gaze to the sky and counts to ten.
‘Manipulative.’ Not Miyuki’s first choice of adjective, but still reasonable; he can see where that comes from. ‘Bastard.’ Oh, definitely, no disagreement there.
But he’s pretty sure that Akira has never once known what he was doing.
“Eijun is concerned,” Miyuki says, helplessly.
“Oh, that won’t last long,” Okumura says, waving away the excuse. “Once I make the first-string, Sawamura-senpai’s going to be my battery partner, and he won’t have to worry about his loser brother anymore.”
Miyuki frowns. “You know I’m the main catcher, right?”
Okumura looks at him.
“Eijun’s my battery partner, too,” Miyuki says, just in case Okumura isn’t picking up on his hints.
“Keep telling yourself that,” Okumura deadpans. “But whatever. This isn’t your business, anyway.”
And with that, Okumura turns around and reenters room 204 to finish his game with Seto.
“Am I not Eijun’s battery partner?” Miyuki asks, sitting on a bench just off the main path leading out of the dorms. He runs a hand through his hair and glares at the ground. “Of course I’m Eijun’s battery partner! I poured blood, sweat, and emotional labor into my battery with Eijun! I’m number two, and Eijun’s number one. We play together almost every game. Can’t he tell that I’m Eijun’s battery partner? Isn’t it obvious?”
Next to him, Zono pulls an earbud out of his ear. “Are you talking to me?”
“Okay, before we get started on this pitching session: why exactly are you concerned about Akira and Okumura?”
Eijun fiddles with his pitching glove and looks at Miyuki like he’s insane. “Have you seen them interact?”
“Yeah, I live with them,” Miyuki says. He rummages through his bag and pulls out his catcher’s mask, but he doesn’t put it on. “Not everyone can get along, though. It’s not like they’re hurting each other. I don’t see why this is such a big deal?”
Eijun falls silent. He looks away, mouth twisting, and Miyuki chews on his lower lip.
“When we were in third grade,” Eijun says, slowly, “Aki broke two of his ribs.”
“I’m aware,” Miyuki says, remembering that solid three weeks after the Fall Tournament when Akira would not shut up about breaking his ribs.
“No, you don’t understand,” Eijun says, hugging himself. A haunted expression crosses his face. “I was on the roof, too! I was right next to him, but then he slipped, and I was too slow to catch him. I was too slow. I couldn’t sleep for weeks. I kept hearing him scream. I kept hearing that awful thud when he hit the ground. And afterward, I couldn’t even make him laugh to cheer him up because it would hurt him. ”
He looks up, eyes watery, and Miyuki feels his heart melt. He steps forward, and Eijun steps forward, and then Miyuki wraps his arms around his boyfriend.
“You understand, right?” Eijun says. “I have to take care of him. He’s my little brother.”
“Okay,” Miyuki replies, patting Eijun’s back. “I’ll help them get along.”
One hour later, as Miyuki’s walking to the bathroom, he freezes mid-step and frowns.
“Wait,” he says aloud. “What does that have to do with anything?”
A couple more days of status quo pass, which means a couple more makeout sessions with Eijun where, somehow, Akira and Okumura inexplicably enter the conversation. If this keeps up for any longer, Miyuki will eternally associate Eijun’s lips with his roommates’ stupidity, which is possibly the worst thing that could ever happen to him. Thus, he has to do it.
He has to actively invite his teammates to his room for game night.
Miyuki sends Kuramochi a text, asking him to spread the word. Kuramochi mocks his txt spk and tells him to send it in the team group chat himself. Miyuki says that he’s trying to keep it secret from his roommates. Kuramochi sends back seven consecutive laughing-crying face emojis.
Miyuki sends his next text to Nabe instead.
It takes a while to get through (for some reason, the signal at school has been weirdly unstable lately), but eventually, he receives confirmation from the most reliable member of their team. Now that the game night is actually going to happen, Miyuki just needs to clean up his room a little and manipulate Akira and Okumura into losing a round of poker and doing some masochistic dare-punishment together. Nothing like a little shared suffering to make two people bond.
The only problem would be getting Akira to lose a round of poker, but with Eijun on Miyuki’s side, he’s confident it could happen. Also, sometimes Akira will let Furuya win a favor or two off of him, so if Miyuki talks to Furuya, then it’s pretty much guaranteed that they’ll be able to get a favor from their resident gambling addict.
Satisfied, Miyuki starts whistling a happy little melody. He walks up the stairs and opens the door to his room, only to find Akira and Okumura in the process of drying out all his Sharpies.
“What the fuck,” he says.
Okumura snarls at him.
“What are you doing?” Miyuki demands, storming into his room. He snatches the paper that Akira is scribbling on and sneezes at the obnoxious scent of permanent marker coming off of it.
Akira, for some reason, has the audacity to look annoyed. “Aren’t you supposed to be at a group project meeting right now?”
“It ended early!” Miyuki yells. “Answer my fucking question!”
“I need black paper for a school project,” Akira says, poker-faced. “So we borrowed your Sharpies.”
“What kind of school project—”
“World history,” Okumura slides in. “They’re doing a class presentation. Indian shadow puppetry.”
“Okumura volunteered to help me color the paper black,” Akira says, like that isn’t a completely nonsensical statement on its own. In what world would Okumura volunteer to help Akira with a school project?
“You know you can get black construction paper from the library, right?” Miyuki says. “You are drying out my Sharpies. Do you know how hard it is to find a working Sharpie? I need these to label scorebooks for Kataoka!”
“Get with the times and start using washi tape,” Okumura says, like an asshole.
“Where’s the library?” Akira asks, like a shithead.
“Out!” Miyuki shouts. He scoops up the paper and markers and kicks Okumura in the side. “Get out, both of you! Go be annoying somewhere else!”
Akira and Okumura scramble out of the room. Akira trips as he pulls on his shoes. Okumura, as always, remembers to take his keys off his desk before he steps outside and closes the door.
Miyuki rolls his eyes. Then he examines his markers.
Earlier today, he had two fresh Sharpies and one that was on its way out. Now he has two dead Sharpies and one that’s on its way out.
“What the hell,” he says, because seriously. What the hell.
Of course the one thing that unites Akira and Okumura is their mutual desire to make Miyuki’s life a living hell. They won’t work together when it comes to taking out the trash, but they will work together to stretch out exactly half of Miyuki’s socks.
(Do you know how uncomfortable it is to wear one normal sock and one loose one? Do you?!)
And Miyuki knows they’re working together, because Eijun finally seems satisfied that his brother and Okumura are getting along. Consequently, Miyuki’s love life has vastly improved. The only problem is that the rest of his life is significantly worse.
They re-lace his shoes so that one side of the string is twice as long as the other. They replace his glasses cleaner with Sprite. They even team up at the aforementioned game night and kick everyone’s asses in the poker game. Then Furuya, Akira, and Okumura all volunteer to get snacks from the vending machines as if they’re best friends. Furuya even comes back telling a joke, and Okumura—get this— laughs.
Miyuki has no fucking clue what happened, but he’s pretty sure that this is somehow Akira’s fault. Okumura, while occasionally rude, was a normal kid. And then Akira corrupted him and redirected his ire, so that instead of bothering Akira, he’s now bothering Miyuki. When he wished for his roommates to get along, he should have specified that he didn’t want them to get along at his expense.
But Miyuki can take the high road. Mature third-year and team captain that he is, he decides to privately confront his roommates so that they can come to some sort of agreement. Except they keep running away.
Miyuki’s done everything he can think of: enlisting Eijun in his attempts to catch them, figuring out their schedules, asking Kuramochi and Zono to lure them into the practice halls for a “baseball business” talk. But somehow, they manage to avoid all of that, which leaves Miyuki, who had tried his emotional best, to break out the big guns and call in the only person in the entire school capable of saving his life.
“And now we’re here,” Miyuki drawls, spreading his hands. “Locked in an equipment shed. Staging an intervention. Having Nori listen to our problems.”
He says this all with a tone flatter than a mathematical plane. Nori can’t blame him. He’s done a lot of weird things in the name of playing team therapist, but this is certainly up there.
“Okay,” Nori says, clapping his hands. “Thank you for sharing your point of view, Miyuki. That was very kind of you.”
“Happy to serve,” Miyuki says, smiling back at him.
(The smile itself isn't very reassuring, but Nori thinks that has more to do with his own exhaustion than anything that Miyuki’s doing.)
Nori clears his throat and gestures to the other two people locked in the equipment shed with them. “Okumura? Akira? Anything to add?”
Okumura snorts. Akira crosses his arms.
“That,” Akira says slowly, “was the most biased piece of bullshit I have ever heard.”