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Despite how much he’d rather die than admit it, Osaka Sougo’s most common activity was regretting his TA position for the head of the music department for his college. Sougo had worked his ass off for this position, and if anyone asked, he’d talk up and down about how grateful he was to have it, what a great opportunity it was for him, but—god, if Professor Orikasa wasn’t the most frustrating man to work with.
He was incredibly reticent, for one thing, about everything that didn’t include his beloved husband, whose name Sougo still somehow was ignorant of, despite knowing everything about the man from his lovely, cheery personality to (unfortunately) his preferred underwear brand. Professor Orikasa was especially reticent about things like grading, and school assignments, and lesson plans, which typically meant it was up to Sougo to put all of that together, and Sougo to grade all the undergrads’ compositions, and Sougo to do most of the run-of-the-mill administrative work that the dean of the music department was supposed to do.
Sougo thunked his head down on the library table he’d commandeered, wondering if, if he looked away from this patchy compostition, it would somehow become less stupid when he looked back. He wasn’t hopeful.
“Tough assignment?” came a wryfully amused voice behind him.
Sougo snapped upward, a smile already finding itself on his face. “Banri!” he said. “I didn’t think you would be in the library today!”
“Well, I had to check up on my favorite TA on campus,” Banri said, pulling out a chair and sitting next to Sougo. Ogami Banri wasn’t a professor. He practically ran the school’s administration office, though, and he’d helped get Sougo this position (“Any professor you want,” he’d said, and, bless him, had even attempted to dissuade Sougo from working with Professor Orikasa), so he was entitled to calling Sougo “his” TA. “How are things going with those?”
Sougo just groaned at him. It wasn’t the best manners, but he’d known Banri since he was an undergrad himself, and Banri had earned the title of “only person in a position of power Sougo wasn’t polite and deferential towards at all times” years ago, back when Sougo was just beginning to pull away from his family and would have regular breakdowns in his down, and, on a few embarrassing occasions, the admin building where Banri worked.
“That bad, huh?” said Banri. “Mind letting me take a look? I used to be involved with music myself, you know.”
Almost unconsciously, Banri reached his hand up to his thick bangs before remembering himself and tucking it under the table.
“Please,” Sougo said desperately—there were things Banri didn’t talk about, and Sougo needed his help too badly to ask about the meaning behind the gesture—and turned his computer to face the man. “It’s just—my God, they’re stupid.”
“You used to be at that level,” Banri reminded him, but then he actually read the highlighted portion and his face twisted into a grimace. “Oh, that’s—okay, yeah, that’s bad. Have you shown that one to, ah, to Professor Orikasa?”
Sougo shook his head. “He makes me grade all of his assignments,” he said.
Banri frowned. “That’s—even for classes you aren’t involved in?” he asked.
“Even for classes I’m in !” Sougo all but wailed.
Banri’s frown deepened. “I’ll talk to him about that,” he said. “That is incredibly inappropriate.”
“Thank you,” Sougo said, though he was almost completely certain it wouldn’t work.
“Of course,” Banri said, before frowning. “Hang on,” he said slowly, peering at one of the few sections Sougo had marked as passable. “Is this the chorus to Stacy’s Mom ?”
“My husband is mad at me,” Yuki said morosely when Sougo brought the stack of printed and graded compositions into his office the next day. “He says I’m not working hard enough.”
“You’re working plenty hard, Professor,” Sougo said, diplomatically. “Here’s your compositions.”
Professor Orikasa perked up. “Which one is a ripoff Stacy’s Mom?” he asked.
“Oh, did Mr. Ogami mention that?” Sougo said. “He did say he was going to talk to you…um, it’s around the center of the pile, and it’s actually a combination of Stacy’s Mom, Rasputin, and a bunch of completely unplayable garbage.”
The professor nodded, already rifling through the compositions. “My husbands are going to love this…” he muttered.
“Wait, husbands plural?” Sougo said, intrigued despite himself. “How does that work?”
“Tax fraud,” said Professor Orikasa, with a lovesick smile. “It was the only reason I could convince him to marry me, and it’s worked out wonderfully.”
Sougo blinked. “...Right,” he said. Professor Orikasa had two husbands, one of whom liked tax fraud more than marriage. That was completely normal. Probably.
Professor Orikasa finally located the composition and ran it through the photocopier, a faint smile playing on his lips that meant he was thinking about his husband—one of them, at least.
Sougo was probably going to need time to process this information, but for now, he was on the clock, so he settled himself in one of the chairs in the professor’s office and started working on the lesson plans.
“Have you ever gotten married, Ban-chan?” Sougo’s roommate, best friend, and platonic life partner Yotsuba Tamaki asked the admin one night when Banri had taken them and a few of their friends out for dinner. Nagi had jokingly proposed to Tsumugi, who had turned him down with a proposal to Iori, who had informed her that he and Riku were still happy together and not looking for a third, actually, and it had all kind of escalated from there until Banri had told them all to settle down and that marriage wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, anyway.
“Once,” Banri said, and the table exploded. He waited until the eight grad students had calmed down, before saying, “It was in undergrad, and entirely for tax purposes, and he—well, he fell for someone else in the end, and they’re absolutely perfect for each other, and I adore his new husband. We’re still friends. The divorce was very amicable, I believe.”
“You believe?” said Iori. “Why aren’t you sure?”
Banri flushed slightly. “I—well, I was in love with him, you see, and—”
The table exploded again.
“Settle down !” Banri said. “I was in love with him, and so trying to avoid the process and avoid speaking with him as much as possible, so—I’m not entirely certain it ever completely went through .”
“What?!” Mitsuki said, delighted.
Banri sighed. “The next year, I got audited by the IRS for incorrectly filing as single, so I’ve been filing as married ever since.”
“Oh my God,” whispered Mitsuki. He was practically vibrating with glee.
“For all intents and purposes, I’m divorced,” said Banri.
Everyone watched him for a few minutes.
“...We still have a bit of an FWB thing going on…” Banri sighed. “I’m still in love with him.”
They were kicked out of the restaurant for being too loud.
“We need to get Banri into a serious relationship,” Iori told Sougo a few weeks later. “He deserves a lot better than to get jerked around by his ex.”
“He sounded like he was happy with the situation, though,” Sougo said. “He’s probably thought about it a lot more than we have.”
“Yeah, but…look. Mitsuki’s pretty close with Coach Sunohara, and he says he’s single, and I know I’ve seen Banri looking at Coach Sunohara’s ass during soccer games way more than once. Banri’s a catch, too, so—”
“How does Mitsuki know if Coach Sunohara’s single?” asked Sougo. “I mean, I know he’s on the soccer team, but…”
“Coach Sunohara literally tells him everything about his life, I’m pretty sure they’re actually friends,” said Iori. “Believe me, he’d know if the coach was in a relationship.”
Sougo sighed. “Fine,” he said, “Tamaki and I can help. I’ll see if Professor Orikasa will, as well, I’m pretty sure he and Banri get together for drinks sometimes, too.”
Iori nodded, pleased. “Thanks,” he said with a small smile, and headed off towards his class. Sougo pulled out his phone, texted Tamaki about the plot they’d been drawn into, learned that Tamaki had in fact already agreed after Riku brought it up once, sighed to himself, and headed up to Professor Orikasa’s office, where he spent a very productive evening working and doing homework (Professor Orikasa had, for whatever reason, suddenly lightened Sougo’s workload, citing the fact that his husband believed he should be doing more of his own work with one of his lovesick smiles) while building up the confidence to ask his boss to help with Banri’s love life. Finally, when Professor Orikasa sent a series of spam texts to someone who appeared to be ignoring him (one of his husbands, maybe?) and then an incredibly needy phone call to someone (maybe the same husband, maybe someone else) whose name Sougo didn’t catch because he was listening to music and didn’t think to turn it down until he heard his professor professing (ha) his eternal love to an answering machine that had apparently been ignoring his texts since 5:17, nearly an entire hour ago, Sougo decided that there was no possible way he could embarrass himself more than his professor just had, and so he spoke up.
“Hey, professor?”
“Yeah?”
“You know Ogami Banri, right?”
Professor Orikasa blinked at him. “Yes. Obviously.”
“Well, some of my friends and I decided to, um, maybe…meddle in his love life.”
Professor Orikasa didn’t say anything.
“We were joking about marriage, and Banri said that he used to be married but is now divorced and is still friends with benefits—that’s, uh, that means…having sex but not romantically…uh, with his ex-husband…but he’s still in love with him…the ex, I mean…but the ex doesn’t love him back…”
Professor Orikasa looked surprised at that.
“And anyway,” Sougo continued quickly, already regretting this, “we decided we’d try and hook him up with the soccer coach, Coach Sunohara. Because the coach is hot. And Mitsuki thinks Banri’s into him.” He paused. “We haven’t told Banri yet.”
Professor Orikasa nodded, very slowly. “I think,” he said, “that hooking Ban and Momo up is a great idea.”
Sougo sighed in relief.
“I also think I should get to watch it when they do hook up.”
“Professor, no!” Sougo yelped. “You’re married ! Twice over!”
Professor Orikasa smirked. “I’m sure my husbands would be alright with it.”
“I don’t care if you’re my boss, I’m not going to—to enable you watching my other boss and the soccer coach—getting it on—especially without their extensive and explicit consent! And we aren’t planning on telling either of them about this plan!”
Professor Orikasa paused, seemed to think it over for a moment, and then nodded. “That’s probably for the best,” he said. “Ban—Ban doesn’t think he’s loved, right?”
“He said that he married the man he was in love with for tax benefits in undergrad, and then that man fell for someone else, and they divorced, but things got messy and the divorce might not have gone entirely through, and that they have regular sex,” Sougo reported.
Professor Orikasa’s face fell, slightly. “And what about…the man his husband married?” he asked. “How does he feel about him?”
“He said they’re perfect for each other and that he adores the new husband,” said Sougo. “Personally, if I were in his position I’d be plotting bloody revenge, but…to each their own, I guess.”
Professor Orikasa shrugged, unbothered; a few months ago Sougo had helped him enact bloody revenge on a man who had attempted to kill (one of) his husbands several years prior, and so he tended to look favorably upon Sougo’s plots of bloody revenge. “So,” he said, “what’s the plan?”
The plan, so to speak, did not actually end up being made until about a week later, after Professor Orikasa (“Call me Yuki outside of the classroom”) managed to both get away from whatever it was he was doing when he wasn’t doing his grading and admin work and from the two husbands whom he was deeply in love with, and sneak into Iori and Riku’s shared apartment, full of ideas on how to make Ogami Banri and Sunohara Momose fall deeply in love with each other. Most of them were idealistic or unrealistic, since the professor seemed to have assumed that Coach Sunohara and Banri knew each other more intimately than Banri simply blatantly ogling the man at soccer games and had built most of his ideas around that assumption. But eventually, they’d all settled on a plan that may not have been quite up to Sougo’s bloody revenge standards, may have, in fact, simply involved locking Banri and Coach Sunohara in a closet after one of the aforementioned soccer games, but it was a plan they were all reasonably certain would work. Sunohara Momose was, according to Mitsuki, a romantic, and Professor Orikasa was convinced that he and Banri were already both into each other, and so everything would be fine. Maybe. Hopefully.
Who was Sougo kidding. This was going to be a disaster.
They got Banri and Coach Sunohara both into the closet. They locked the door. They gave the key to Kujo Tenn on the other side of campus and told him to swallow it. He didn’t, probably because he was more sensible than all of Sougo’s friends combined, but he did accept the key after a pleading look from Riku.
Two days later, a wedding invitation fluttered down to land on the keyboard as Sougo was grading Professor Orikasa’s latest assignment. He looked up to see Banri smirking down at him. His hair was braided over one shoulder, and, for the first time, Sougo could see a thin scar snaking down the right side of Banri’s face.
“We’re having a vow renewal next month,” he said, unable to hide his pleasure, “and you and the rest of your troublemaking friends are invited.”
“We?” Sougo asked.
“My husbands and I,” said Banri. He smirked at Sougo’s clear astonishment. “What, Yuki didn’t tell you? We married straight out of high school, for tax benefits. Honestly, I’m surprised you didn’t know already, what with your little plot to get Momo and I to actually talk out our relationship out.”
“You’re the tax-frauding husband,” Sougo gasped out, because of course he was, because this was his life now.
Banri smirked again. “I did tell you I’d been fraudulently filing as married for several years now,” he said. “You can hardly fault me for thinking you’d already figured it out.”
Sougo groaned. “I’m glad we made for good marriage counselors,” he muttered.
Banri patted his head consolingly. “You were the best marriage counselors,” he said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to have a pre-honeymoon. If you need me, Yuki, or Momo…don’t.”
“That’s nasty,” Sougo muttered, but Banri only laughed and left the library.