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“Akaaaaaaaaashiiiiiiiiiiii—” howled a voice from the top of the stairs, and Keiji had half a second to brace himself before a hundred and eighty pounds of distraught chef barrelled into him.
“Akaashi, it’s awful,” Bokuto cried, burying his face into Keiji’s shoulder, and Keiji resigned himself to having to change out his dishtowel before he went back into the kitchen. “I’m never going to cook again for the rest of my life, it’s all over. I’m going to drop out today, I don’t deserve to show my face in this academy.”
Keiji patted the back of Bokuto’s head around the sharp spikes he always gelled his hair into, and glanced up the stairs to the second floor.
Draped across the banister, looking like a cat who’d just eaten an entire flock of canaries, was Kuroo. Keiji noted a splash of something red on his collar, and the absence of his usual apron. The one he was wearing was nearly identical, but it didn’t have the cat’s paw embroidered in the corner, which immediately put Keiji on edge. He looked around Kuroo, but saw neither hide nor hair of Kenma, which was even more alarming, given that he’d left the three of them an hour ago, happy as pigs in mud, or as Totsuki students with a new recipe to test.
He raised an eyebrow in Kuroo’s direction. Kuroo’s smirk didn’t fade, and his posture remained almost obstinately relaxed, but he shook his head, just once, and Keiji nodded minutely.
Bokuto let out another wail, and mashed his head even more firmly into Keiji’s shoulder. Keiji turned his face slightly to the side in order to avoid being jabbed in the eye by a hair spike, and considered. He had approximately thirty seconds before Bokuto collapsed on the floor, spoiling his uniform entirely, and was useless for the rest of the day. If it was bad enough, he might even actually go through with his threat to drop out, which he’d never done before, but there was always a first for everything.
He compiled his data as fast as he could. Kenma was missing, Kuroo was visibly smug but quietly signaling that something had gone dreadfully wrong, and Bokuto was deep in a downward spiral even though it had only been an hour. At no point during Keiji’s meeting had any of his school-wide media alerts been tripped, which meant there hadn’t been an official food war, and there certainly hadn’t been any new decrees made by the Ten, given that he himself would have had to be there to make up a quorum. He closed his eyes for a moment, and considered. Bokuto was upset, which was the most pressing issue. He could parse through the rest of it later.
“Bokuto,” he said calmly, pressing his hand closer to his back in a facsimile of a hug before nudging him away, “You are not going to leave the academy.”
Bokuto sniffed, and refused to meet Keiji’s gaze. “I’ll become a dishwasher at the back of the classroom.”
“You will not.” At a certain point, simply denying Bokuto’s fantasies was more effective than trying to rationally deconstruct them. “Bokuto, you are the number four seat on the Council of Ten, and you are an excellent chef.” He wrapped a hand around Bokuto’s wrist, and squeezed gently. “I made a new bouillon base, I want you to try it.”
Bokuto’s head shot up. “What’s it for? I thought you moved on from soups last month? You said you were focusing on roasts now.”
Keiji smiled privately to himself. There was nothing like a new idea to get Bokuto to immediately move on from his own Epic Tragedies. “I am,” he said, and left it at that. Bokuto loved mysteries, as long as he solved them quickly.
Now that Bokuto was no longer inches from a complete meltdown, Keiji looked back up at Kuroo, who was still at the top of the stairs, watching them. He gave another nod, and Kuroo’s smile widened for a moment before he pushed himself off of the banister and disappeared into an upstairs classroom.
Keiji tapped on the inside of Bokuto’s wrist, and then tugged him upstairs, moving casually and comfortably by his side, never making it too obvious that he was the one leading Bokuto rather than the other way around. There were students lingering in the entryway, doing a terrible job of pretending not to watch them, and Kuroo had been too carelessly casual for it not to have had a purpose. Keiji could feel the eyes on his back as they walked up the stairs, and he tightened his grip. Bokuto still had that fragile look on his face, as if he could at any moment fall back off of the cliff of despair. He was distracted, but not completely at peace. They couldn’t afford to let him fall apart while there were still other people around them.
The room that Kuroo disappeared into was at the top of the stairs, one of the beautifully appointed classrooms that had recently gotten an update. Keiji had a French patisserie class in the room across the hall, and it was identical, except the counters here were made of butcher block instead of marble. Not a pastry classroom, then. He glanced up into the far corner of the ceiling as they entered, and found his suspicions confirmed. The room was too newly refurbished to have cameras put in place yet.
Kuroo was leaning against one of the counters, idly flipping a paring knife through his fingers. It was remarkable that he’d never cut any of them off, Keiji had always thought, but he’d yet to even give himself a serious injury. It was either pure skill or the luck of the devil, and with Kuroo it was occasionally impossible to distinguish between the two.
Next to Kuroo, sitting on the floor in complete disregard for proper kitchen etiquette and hygiene, was Kenma. Keiji could feel his shoulders drop in relief, and only then did he realize how worried he’d been. It was rare to see Kuroo without Kenma lingering just a few steps behind, even if he was almost always engrossed in a phone or a tablet. He hadn’t realized just how nervous it would make him to see one without the other.
An apron with a tiny cat paw embroidered in the corner sat next to Kenma, covered in splashes of the same sticky red on Kuroo’s collar. Kenma was fixated on the small laptop on his knees.
“It wasn’t your filling,” he said as Keiji and Bokuto entered the room. Keiji was still holding on to Bokuto’s wrist, and he could feel his whole body go as rigid as his ridiculous hair spikes.
Kuroo’s knife stopped spinning in the air, and he looked down at Kenma with narrow eyes. “What do you mean, it wasn’t his filling? I got it all over me. What else could it have been?”
“I don’t know,” Kenma replied, giving his screen one last glance before closing it with a firm snap. He met Kuroo’s eyes with one of his patented blank stares. Keiji often wondered if there was a way to learn how to use that look himself, or if it required Kenma’s unnerving golden eyes to be effective. He’d love to add it to his collection of intimidating looks, if possible, but he suspected it was a Kenma special. He’d seen him reduce grown men three times his age and size to dumbfounded silence with that look, and at the same time use it to convince overly friendly classmates to disregard him completely. It could also be used to reduce Kuroo to sentimental mush, but that was definitely a Kenma-only effect. Kenma could reduce Kuroo to sentimental mush by chopping celery. The only thing that made it less embarrassing to watch was knowing that Kuroo could still talk a hunter into veganism even at his most overcome.
Kuroo and Kenma appeared to have a silent conversation, consisting only of Kenma’s flat look, and various meaningful twitches of Kuroo’s eyebrows and mouth. Keiji waited patiently, as did Bokuto, who hardly did anything patiently. There was no rushing genius, or at least no rushing whatever childhood friend mind-meld the two of them had going on. The only people Keiji had ever seen match it were Oikawa and Iwazumi, which supported the theory that it was a special childhood friend bond, and Hinata and Kageyama, who trashed the theory utterly, but Keiji was of the belief that they were outliers and should absolutely never be counted for anything.
“It was supposed to be a raspberry tart,” Kuroo said abruptly, turning to face them, looking more serious than usual. “We were trying a new filling of Bokuto’s, he said it came to him in a dream last night.”
“I remember,” Keiji said dryly. He’d been the one that Bokuto had woken up at three in the morning, pounding on his door to let him know that he’d decided to try fresh crushed cardamom seeds instead of ground. He’d also been the one to write down the recipe in order to convince Bokuto to go back to bed, and the one to deposit him with Kuroo and Kenma in their favorite test kitchen that morning to fiddle with the specifics of it while he took one for the team and attended the informal meeting on their behalf. It should have been a perfectly normal day. He’d even gone over the recipe with Bokuto over breakfast, and as far as he could tell the idea had been sound. More than sound, it had been brilliant, because Bokuto was brilliant, but he’d decided to save that praise until he needed an ace up his sleeve. He hadn’t expected the time to come so soon.
“It was a great idea,” Kuroo said loyally, and Bokuto sniffed. He shuffled up to Keiji’s back to lean on his shoulder again, but at least he wasn’t burying his head in Keiji’s chef whites and blocking out the world, so Keiji let him stay.
“It should have worked,” Kenma put in, looking intently at the floor in front of his feet. Bokuto tucked the hand that wasn’t still in Keiji’s grip into the fold of his apron, and poked him completely unnecessarily. Keiji was Kenma’s friend too, he knew what a genuine compliment sounded like.
“Kenma was working on that spicy tempura ice cream, and I was testing my new sushi knife, but we were all there, the whole time, and I would swear I saw exactly what Bokuto put into that filling. It was fine. It was great, actually, and when we tried it, it tasted great too.” Kuroo looked uncharacteristically frustrated. He paused, and shook his head.
Kenma took up the thread. “The ice machine in Test Kitchen C is broken— Kuro and I both sent in work orders last week, but no one’s fixed it, so we should probably ask in person, or just fix it ourselves— and we needed ice, so right after the tart went in the oven to set we went to next door to get some.”
“We were gone for maybe five minutes at the most,” Kuroo continued, scowling. “When we came back, it all seemed fine. But when the tart came out of the oven—”
“It curdled,” Bokuto said with a tremor in his voice. Keiji smoothed his hand over his arm in an automatic soothing gesture, and he felt more than heard him take a long, shuddery breath.
“Being fair, it really…” Kuroo trailed off, looking far too much like he might crack an extremely unhelpful smile. Keiji gave him a preemptive glare, still absently stroking Bokuto’s arm, and he subsided.
“It exploded,” Kenma said bluntly, and Bokuto made a whimpering noise. “It wasn’t your fault, though.”
“Not at all,” Kuroo rushed to say. “It’s been tampered with. Clearly.” He leaned down, over Kenma’s bowed head, to pick up his discarded apron. “Taste it,” he said, offering them the largest patch of red shmear.
Keiji had spent far too long at Totsuki not to react automatically when someone offered him something to taste. He took one of his tasting spoons from his pocket, and ignored Kuroo’s snort as he delicately scraped at the wettest looking part of the red stuff. Bokuto huffed a quiet almost laugh into his ear, which was, if he was being completely honest with himself, at least half of the reason he’d done it in the first place.
The taste was decidedly odd. It wasn’t something he could place, but it certainly wasn’t the recipe they’d written together the night before. There was an almost chemical burn to it, and he nearly asked if they were insane, making him try something like that, before realizing that he knew what that particular flavor was. “Baking soda?” he asked, frowning down at the spoon in his hand. More importantly, however, “There isn’t a trace of crushed cardamom in that. It’s more like—” he rolled the flavor around in his mouth for another moment “—all spice? And cloves?”
“Not bad,” Kenma said. “That’s about what I got, too. Kuro says it’s more like star anise, but he picked up the baking soda too.”
“Have you taken this to Oikawa yet? Or Kageyama?” They didn’t spend an awful lot of time working with either of them, but he trusted their integrity, and, more importantly, their supertaster tongues.
“Not yet,” Kuroo said. “We think—”
“We know,” Kenma corrected, tapping at the lid of his laptop. “The cameras fritzed for a couple minutes while we were out of the room.”
“So it was an intentional sabotage,” Keiji said softly. Kenma and Kuroo looked up at him as one, and nodded, their eyes guarded, but they weren’t what he needed to focus on. He felt Bokuto exhale explosively against the back of his neck. “It might not even have been your tart, Kotaru,” he said, because someone needed to say it out loud, and where Bokuto was concerned, that person would always end up being him. “It certainly isn’t your filling.”
“Are you sure?” Bokuto asked, his voice softer and more vulnerable than it ever was, except when he was speaking to Keiji.
“Absolutely,” Keiji said firmly, and then, in a lighter tone, “Unless you’re doubting my sense of taste?”
“Never,” Bokuto swore, finally emerging fully from behind Keiji’s back. Keiji dropped his wrist just in time for Bokuto to spin him around and grab him by the shoulders, shaking him slightly. His eyes were dazzlingly bright, his smile was infectious, and even his hair seemed to be lighter and more energized. “In that case, we should definitely make it again, I had an idea while I was making this one that I wanted to test, and now that my first attempt is gone I can start completely from scratch, plus I want to hear what you’re doing with bouillon and roasts—”
Keiji let Bokuto chatter away cheerfully in his ear, and paid attention to his babbling with half of his focus. Just beyond Bokuto’s head he made eye contact with Kenma and Kuroo, both of whom looked as though a weight had come off of them at Bokuto’s return to normal. Their faces were still grave, however, and Keiji nodded at them.
Bokuto began bouncing his way to the door, as always, completely recovered in less time than it took Keiji to read a room, and Keiji followed him, because he always would. Behind him, he could hear Kuroo murmuring to Kenma, and then the usual shuffling noises of Kuroo offering Kenma a hand, and then physically lifting him to his feet with absolutely no effort from Kenma, who disdained standing and active motion in all forms. They moved as a group out into the hall, and Keiji kept a gentle touch on Bokuto’s elbow, guiding him down the stairs and towards the open door rather than into one of the other test kitchens. They would be safer in the dormitory, where they could be sure of the loyalty of all of their dormmates, and the efficiency of the security system. It was less practical for cooking purposes, but much better for quiet planning.
As they walked, Keiji turned the matter over in his head. Everyone knew that Bokuto was a brilliant chef, with an Achilles’ heel as obvious as the sky was blue. It would be the work of a moment to wait for an opportunity to pour baking soda into his filling, even if it was already in the oven. It was much more complicated to have prepared a completely separate tart to replace his with, and arrive at the right room at just the right time, where an ice machine was conveniently broken despite the request of two separate members of the Elite Ten, and then to scramble the cameras to hide the process of switching. That filling, scraped so carefully off of Kuroo’s ruined apron, had absolutely no cardamom in it whatsoever.
Not only that, but now there was someone walking around with a version of Bokuto’s raspberry tart in their hands, complete with the secret ingredient. Whether they’d be able to reverse engineer the process was entirely beside the point. Keiji didn’t intend to give them the opportunity.
The spring festival began in two weeks. Kenma and Kuroo were just as committed to this as he was, and they could draw on reinforcements if they had to. Rather powerful reinforcements, at that. They would find whoever was taking shots at the fourth seat on the Ten, and bring them down. With force, if necessary.
Keiji was looking forward to it.