Chapter Text
Wet sneakers squeak against tile. The equally wet thing they're attached to holds something resembling an umbrella. Delicately wrapped in a clear plastic bag, the tortured umbrella has pointy metal bits that make boxy shapes against the bag’s film, freshly ripped black panels, and a cracked bit of plastic at the handle.
It's a waste of space— a torn up, trashy, cheap thing. Why does this student still hold onto the umbrella? It might be more relevant to the current situation to ask why they're bent on attending a class they are forty minutes late to. Overall, these two things put together might indicate determination to not give up on lost causes.
Harada Minoru thought that if it had already cost him this much heartache (and the sacrifice of a perfectly good umbrella) to make it to class today, he might as well show up to entertain the tail-end of the useless syllabus lecture. The class is some general education requirement he’s purposely put off until now for the express purpose of slacking off during his last year.
Walking into class this late might be embarrassing— the door would clang noisily, maybe the professor would clearly pause for a moment— but tucking tail and returning home at this point would be more so.
And so he bravely opens the door, bravely eases it quietly shut, and turns around to take in the classroom.
And the singular empty seat, standing out from the middle of a row on the opposite side of the room.
Minoru begins his shuffle over, hands clasping the keychains on his backpack in two large bunches to keep them from slapping annoyingly against each other. Water slides off his damp hair at the nape of his neck and falls beneath his collar. He whispers sorry, sorry, excuse me, as he shimmies down the row, putting on a polite act despite the curses running through his head.
“...not notified beforehand, late work will not be accepted. Please only contact me on the…”
He pulls out the least waterlogged notebook from his bag when he gets to the forsaken seat, and scribbles the class number on it. A single water droplet takes the opportunity to slide down a curl sticking out from his forehead and down onto the ‘a’ in ‘leadership.’ It spreads instantly through the paper, raised ridges appearing in the wake of a growing wet, black smudge.
He sighs with some frustration, immediately giving up on writing any notes. Everything said today would all be in the syllabus, anyways…
“...will be dropped, so requests for exam make-ups will be…”
While the professor continues to drone, a sharp elbow pushes his own away from the edge of his side of the desk. Minoru’s head tilts forward and catches itself only a few inches away from banging onto the surface of the desk. He swivels to look in the direction of the shove, and sees his deskmate for the first time.
It’s only for a second, but there's long bangs shadowing sharp eyes, curling and tangling around most of the person’s face. A thin neck, high shirt collar, lips pressed in displeasure. The other person turns his head distinctly away from Minoru. A different view then, of his nose slope and a slice of ear visible behind dark hair.
And the student's hand pulling out a tissue to dab pointedly on the edge of his wet notebook covered in neat scrawl. Ah.
Minoru's shoulders hunch as he scrunches his elbows in further and pushes his sleeves up, the fabric that was heavy and bloated with water dragging against itself. Screw the class, screw any sense of pride, he should’ve just gone back home. Seriously.
“...cover more on Wednesday, see you then.”
The sharp uptick in hustle that arrives with the end of class begins, and Minoru turns to his seatmate again with an apologetic smile.
“Hey, I’m really sorry about that! Getting to class was a mess, I didn’t even see your paper there, I promise. Are your notes alright? Not too soggy?” Minoru’s hands hovers awkwardly and open-palmed in the air in what he hopes is a placating gesture.
The person continues to pack his bag. His head tilts down, and not a single discerning feature is visible.
After a long pause: “It’s fine. Please excuse me.” The words are stilted and cold.
“Aah, really, hey, don’t be mad! I can rewrite them for you? I can, um–”
“It’s fine.” The student finally pauses to look up through his wavy curtain of hair and underlines the finality of his words with a flat look.
Did he only have a vocabulary of four words? How did he get admitted into college? "It's fine, it's fine, go away" is not college essay-worthy, even Minoru could tell.
“If you insist,” Minoru’s smile was reaching the end of what it could endure through, but nevertheless, he finishes strong: “Here's hoping the rest of your day is better! Sorry again, man!”
The student doesn’t even verbally respond, just curtly nodding and shouldering his bag. And he leaves.
Somehow, God has not only failed today to ever release Minoru from his misery, maybe with an asteroid or timely lightning bolt, but also to force him to sit next to someone who could make forgiveness for screwing up their notes sound like a curse.
Minoru shakes his head a few times as if to ward off the awkward haze of the previous fifteen minutes. He leaves the classroom to the soft sounds of rain sliding down the windows of the hallway.
Really, his hair had just dried off.
The next week, Minoru sits out at the bus stop fifteen minutes early. It's clear, sunny, and the bedraggled umbrella is left behind quietly in a corner of his apartment somewhere. The bus is even on time, and so Minoru walks into the classroom five minutes early with his hands in his pockets.
A few minutes later, someone sits next to him.
The thin fingers and plain face are the same as the student from a week ago. The button up is a different color, this time, but it's still neatly buttoned all the way up. He has that clean and generic feeling of someone who could be on a textbook cover.
Minoru’s blatant stare and strange thoughts must not disturb him, since the student next to him just opens up his notes and stares fixedly at them, his back straight and shoulders unmoving.
The lack of social ability between the both of them gives Minoru a silent second to wonder, why exactly, this uptight guy would sit next to him again. There were other seats open. Minoru makes a show out of leaning back in his chair and staring at some of them. Maybe he hadn’t noticed?
The student next to him remains utterly still.
And so his attempt at telepathy failed.
Right, then. Hello again, seatmate.
The professor taps her mic and class starts. Minoru scribbles notes the entire time, occasionally bored enough to check the angle of his seatmate’s shoulders. No one had posture that consistently good, right? Except he did. Maybe he did ballet as a kid. What a maniac. You can't trust guys that wear button ups and dance ballet.
Ah, the professor changed the slide.
Class ends in this way. If not for the silence and monotony of the professor’s voice the entire time, maybe Minoru would have had something to fill his empty head with besides idle curiosity. But he didn’t, so, he swivels his chair to the side.
“Hey, we met last week, right?” Minoru starts carefully, casually, making sure his body is angled enough to the side that the deskmate couldn’t mistake him as talking to anyone else. “Why’d you sit next to me again, did your notes want to go for round two?” Minoru’s head leans further into his hand with a forced upturn to his lips.
In an improvement over last time, the student stops packing up at the first prompting. “Do you need to hear it a third time? I don’t waste words. They were fine.” The student stands upright, and his stare is no less frigid when its point of origin changes to two feet above Minoru’s head.
Suddenly, Minoru re-understands why he didn’t talk to him more last time as he, once again, flounders for a path forwards a mere two seconds into the conversation.
“Haha, right,” Forced laughter. Ugh. The classics always work: “So, what’s your name?”
“Utsugi Noriyuki.”
“That sounds nice,” Minoru says. What else are you supposed to say to these things?
He figures he wasn’t getting asked for his name in return, but for some reason he beats on, against the impenetrable and perpetually pissed off tide.
“I’m Harada Minoru, nice to meet you!” He tries to convincingly sound enthusiastic about it, but he doesn’t quite have the courage to stick out his hand. Utsugi would probably leave him hanging.
In response, the tension in Utsugi’s face seems to relax a millimeter or two, maybe his eyes squint a little less, maybe his eyebrows scrunch apart. It may have just been wishful thinking on Minoru’s part. Those damn shoulders are still so straight.
“Nice… uhm,” Utsugi hesitates with a bit of a complex expression, “Nice to meet you, too.” He says with all the seriousness and formality of a eulogy.
The awkwardness was endearing, and a little sad. Maybe he’d scared away everyone with his glacial politeness and had no one to practice ‘nice to meet you’ and ‘thank you’ with. Must be hard to want to get through the requisite two entire conversations with him to open his hidden ‘make small talk’ route.
Minoru’s smile stretches into something approaching genuine, “So, Utsugi, what’s your major?”
Utsugi shifts his weight a little but continues to stand, “I’m in science.” There's another strange pause where he probably considers if it was appropriate to ask the question back. Come on now, Utsugi, of course it is.
“You?”
Minoru mentally cheers for him.
“Journalism! But I changed a few times,” Minoru laughs easily and waves his hand around to illustrate the point. “I’ve been in college too long, at this point, so this one has to stick.”
Utsugi inclines his head but doesn’t smile at the light-hearted remark. The squeak of chairs and rough sounds of people packing up fill the empty space in their conversation’s script, but Utsugi’s gaze is unwavering.
Minoru finally stands up from the flimsy desk chair and finds there’s still a few centimeters of vertical distance between their eyes. It’s an improvement over a few feet. He pats Utsugi on the shoulder, “Then, I’ll see you next week, Utsugi.”
The contact is hard, his hands feeling the bones of his joint, but the quietly hummed acknowledgement barely heard in response was soft.
When Noriyuki walks through the door next week, he doesn’t see anyone with scuffed sneakers and a worn messenger bag. The classroom feels tidier than it used to. He moves measuredly over to the same seat he’s been in the past two weeks, three seats from the end of the fourth row.
More people skip this week, the seats on either side of him remain empty.
The sun shines through the high windows in the lecture hall, illuminating specks of dust floating in the air. The weather is pleasant, but the light feels cold.
When the professor finishes reading off this week’s slides, Noriyuki’s hand moves to finish the last few words of his notes. And he leaves.
“Hey!”
The hallway is loud as students from other lectures fill the space.
“Hey, ah, Utsugi, wait up,”
My name, Noriyuki dully thinks, and turns to face the speaker.
Noriyuki’s height naturally puts his wavy head of hair above the rest of the throng, but sadly, it doesn’t give him full immunity to the push and pull of the crowd.
A boy with his head down staring at a map on his phone hurries by, and as he passes he narrowly clips Noriyuki’s shoulder. Noriyuki stumbles a few steps backward, hard, into the corner of some lockers.
Suddenly, he’s staring at the tiles of the floor instead of at a bunch of bobbing heads.
The kid with the phone has long fast-walked away, he must have been late. How inconsiderate. The tiles are hard against the palms of his hands and his backside dully aches from the impact.
“Are you alright? Sorry,” An apologetic voice rings in his ears, and Noriyuki’s field of vision tilts up just enough to see Harada’s sheepish smile and outstretched hand.
“Why are you sorry?” Noriyuki pushes himself up into a sitting position and rubs the dust off his hands. “I’m alright. Thank you.”
He ignores Harada’s hand. He’ll get up in a second. Noriyuki accidentally meets his eyes for a millisecond, and there’s a glint in them like he’d steeled himself for this exact outcome.
Harada clearly gets impatient with how long his arm hangs in the air untouched, and takes the initiative to grab at Noriyuki’s hand himself after a bit of huffing to himself.
Noriyuki’s fingers never close to form the other side of the grip, hanging limply in Harada’s grasp. But he feels the dry warmth, feels the soft flesh on the hand’s interior on the back of his fingers, and, farther up, feels the calluses under Harada’s index finger beneath the second knuckle of Noriyuki’s pinky. Feels the imprint of his bones pressing into something solid.
He easily stumbles upward and Harada shifts his grip from his hands to his shoulders so he doesn’t overbalance. Noriyuki admittedly feels a bit off-center, but not so much in the physical way. Do normal people put their hands all over others this much? It’s unbecoming.
He brusquely brushes Harada’s hands off him when his feet find themselves parallel to the floor again.
“Sorry, I was just trying to get your attention earlier, I was really late to class again. I didn’t go in this time—”
“Probably for the best.”
“Hey.” Harada’s lips quirk, the word tinged with amusement. “But— yeah, I was wondering if I could look at your notes for today? See what I missed?”
Noriyuki blinks, and wonders if this is what Harada was always after. The reason why he was so friendly and open to someone who offers so little in return.
Harada fidgets with the edge of his sweater, it’s oversized on him, making his shoulders look a little narrow. Noriyuki turns his face away, the frame of his view shifting away from the slightly sloppy student in front of him to take in the scuffs on the floor he just left.
He regrets something, he wasn’t sure what. Just the slight burn of embarrassment of going outside his tiny comfort zone for someone who wasn’t interested in the same way.
“Okay. You can see them,” Noriyuki finally offers, simply. The words are flat. He kneels down and ruffles through his bag for the notes.
“No, no, you don’t have to show me here. Are you busy?”
Noriyuki feels more irritation bubble in his chest, it was one thing to ask for something easily given, but time was irreplaceable. He hazards a glance at Harada’s face and finds the curve of his eyes careless and the sprawl of his hair reminiscent of someone who didn’t own a comb. It irritates him. He should make up some excuse.
Begrudgingly, Noriyuki says, “I’m not busy.” It sounds no different from how he normally talks.
“Great!” Harada’s eyes narrow to slits and he bounces a little on the balls of his feet, he definitely hasn’t caught on to Noriyuki’s mood. “Let’s go to the library!”
Let’s try to find suitable seating in the library, is what he should’ve said. Harada leads Noriyuki around to several floors, taking a leisurely tour of the facilities as they observe students filling all of the tables. Harada looks slightly frazzled as he finally gives up and suggests they sit on one of those hard hallway benches, the kind that are just a chunk of plastic laminate sticking out of a wall.
Noriyuki wants to go home sometime in the next century though, so he takes a mildly uncomfortable seat without complaint.
“We covered a few different things in class today, none of it was hard.” Noriyuki stuffs the notes into Harada’s hands with little fanfare. “Tell me if anything is confusing.”
Not that Noriyuki wants to particularly spend more time with him, the words just slip out in a sense of politeness that’s been ingrained since birth.
Harada delicately takes the notebook and scans the words. Eventually: “Your handwriting is really nice.”
“Uh.” Noriyuki replies helpfully, “Thank you.” He’d helped his sister with learning stroke order for a few years, but she’d quickly grown out of it. His lines remained crisp and clean as a reminder.
“No problem. Everything looks great to me, can I snap a picture?” Noriyuki nods and Harada fiddles with his phone. “Thanks! I hate to ask you to do anything else, but could you also watch my stuff for a sec? I’ll be right back.”
Noriyuki doesn’t respond, but Harada has already left.
A few minutes later, Harada shows back up holding two drinks in one hand and his wallet in the other.
“Do you like coffee? Ah–” One of the cans slips out of his precarious grasp and thumps unceremoniously on the carpet. “Well. You can have the other one.”
Harada sighs a little as he sets down his wallet and retrieves the can from under the seats. He looks ridiculous crawling on the ground in public. Noriyuki wonders if he’ll hit his head on the bench when he stands up. He seems like that type of airhead.
Miraculously, he emerges without incident. Minoru plops on the bench besides Noriyuki and prompts, “So?”
“Ah… yes. Thank you.” Noriyuki takes the can from him with both hands. His fingers interlock and he feels the heat seep from it. It’s already hot in the library, and the additional warmth is uncomfortable. He moves it onto the empty seat next to him.
Harada wipes the top of the dropped can with his discarded coat sleeve diligently, then he pops it open and takes a swig. He seems to attempt to engage Noriyuki in a conversation about something, but Noriyuki can’t seem to pay full attention to all his winding, frivolous sentences. He hums a little sometimes and it’s all the encouragement Harada needs to keep talking at him.
“Oh,” Harada exclaims suddenly, snapping Noriyuki out of his haze. “I have a class soon, I totally lost track of time.”
“You should go.”
“Right, right, I’ll see you later,” Harada slips his arms into his coat and then yanks on the zipper. “Not a fan after all? I can throw it away for you.” He inclines his head towards the drink sitting next to Noriyuki, untouched. If he’s sad about it, it doesn’t show.
“No…,” Noriyuki trails off, not willing to put an excuse as silly as ‘the heater in here is set too high for hot drinks’ into words. “Don’t miss your class.” He settles on.
“I won’t. Bye, Utsugi!” Harada waves enthusiastically and nearly jogs away. Some of the keychains on his bag clink together, and Noriyuki is left sitting on the pathetic wall bench. He sighs.
How to summarize the last half hour of his life…
Harada talks too much. Harada may or may not be sincere. Harada likes hot drinks and thinks his handwriting is nice. Useless facts that can’t be purged from his mind. Sometimes, Noriyuki wishes human memory was like computer memory. He could delete the file named Harada_Minoru.txt, freeing the space for something useful. Like all the facts he needed to know for the upcoming exam on cellular biology.
Noriyuki finally reaches over and cradles the lukewarm can of coffee. The temperature wasn’t so bad, now.