Work Text:
“Sakunami-kun, watch out!”
Kousuke whips his head up toward the voice, about to ask what’s wrong when a wrench falls perfectly into his palm. “Ah,” he says with a grimace. He didn’t even realize that he’d reached for it.
This has been going on for weeks. There’s a tally of on-site accidents at the back of their logbook, and someone recently brought his spotless record to everyone’s attention. His coworkers have since made it their mission to tarnish it.
It’s a game that Kousuke doesn’t know how not to play. His classmates had done the same in high school. He has more scars from classroom accidents than volleyball ones.
Working in construction was supposed to spare him some of his misery, but his coworkers seem to have no qualms about violating several company safety protocols in the name of satiating their curiosity.
Once is an accident: an empty coffee mug set down slightly too close to the edge. Twice is a coincidence: a ladder leant against the wall just a few degrees off. Three times is a pattern: a few too many pencils thrown his way. A wooden plank tucked under someone’s arm instead of hauled over their shoulder. A hammer used to pry a really tough nail, I swear.
Kousuke sighs. “Which one of you threw that at me?”
On the third story, two of his coworkers point at each other.
He hears the click of a tongue and turns to find his supervisor behind him. She looks unimpressed, wearing the same expression Nametsu always had around Futakuchi and Koganegawa. “This game has been going on long enough,” she chides.
Kousuke clenches and unclenches his fist around the wrench. For what it’s worth, the game hasn’t gotten anyone hurt yet. If he thought for a second that he was in any real danger, he probably would have said something sooner.
“Do you know how many fatal accident reports are made in this line of work every year?” she asks. “According to the Industrial Safety and Health Association, 200 to 300. If you ask me, too many.”
Seventeen meters above them, those two coworkers from earlier hang their heads. Other workers turn away from the scene, too, looking properly chastised.
“Sakunami-kun has pulled many of you out of harm’s way,” she continues. “This is not the time or place to mess around.”
Kousuke feels the blood rush to his face, ducking his head as she stares them down. Her concern is warranted, if a little bluntly phrased. No one was going to die. He’s a little too embarrassed to feel any sort of vindication.
She asks, just once, if she’s made herself clear. Everyone nods back stiffly before busying themselves with their work. Kousuke finds himself nodding along, too.
When she takes her leave, muttering under her breath about a meeting with investors, there’s a collective sigh of relief that isn’t quite enough to dispel the tension lingering in the atmosphere.
“Uhm,” Kousuke says, wrench still in hand as he looks back up at the third story. “Did you need this back?”
Going back to work is more awkward than anything. He doesn’t harbor any lasting resentment toward his coworkers, but he also can’t help his relief when he asks someone to pass him a spade and the tool is handed over without much fanfare. There’s some talk about the weather, plans for the long weekend, and that ominously cold corner on the ground floor.
Kousuke likes his job—doesn’t regret working straight out of high school, or choosing construction over electronics, or the week it took to get licensed to operate a forklift.
A lot of Kousuke’s job is learning to handle equipment that does the heavy lifting for him, and that’s nothing to do with size nor strength. That’s just practicality. Technology has come a long way since the discovery of fire. If there’s an easier way to do something, why not use it?
His height isn’t a disadvantage if he doesn’t let it be one.
When he went to Tokyo Disneyland with his old teammates, Coach Oiwake’s daughter had sized him up at the entrance and asked if he was even tall enough for the rides. It wasn’t very creative, as far as jabs at his height go. Kousuke was more offended that she thought he would be bested by some amusement park ride considering he rappelled down the side of hundred-meter buildings for a living.
It’s been a long time since Kousuke has felt any desire to be tall. Ushijima Wakatoshi is a better volleyball player than him, and a few extra centimeters would not change that. He was good at volleyball. He’s good at what he does now. Kousuke has conquered towers like Tsukishima Kei, Hyakuzawa Yuudai, Hakuba Gao—but he’s since moved on to building them himself brick by brick.
“Sakunami-kun!” someone calls. “Do you have a moment?”
He eases his foot off the gas pedal, shouting back “Sure thing!” as he reverses the forklift into its designated lot. “Give me a second!” He brings the fork down the mast and pulls down the parking brake, making sure everything is in order before turning the engine off. Safety first and all that.
“You really like driving that thing around, huh?”
Kousuke laughs, clipping the keys onto his utility belt. “Best ¥30,000 I ever spent.” Sports cars are overrated anyway. He hauls himself up by the vehicle’s frame and leaps off, landing in front of his coworkers with a grin. He reaches for the rim of his hard hat and tips his head forward in greeting. “Hey, sorry about—”
“First of all,” one of them starts. “You didn’t even pay for your forklift certification. Second of all, what the hell are you sorry for? We wanted to apologize to you.”
He dismisses the sentiment with a wave of his hand. For all that he complained, Kousuke is just grateful to have come out of every incident unscathed. No harm, no foul. “It was fun for a bit,” he even admits. “I dealt with a lot worse back in high school, anyway.”
“Worse than that time with the—?”
He clears his throat, effectively cutting her off. “Maybe not that one. I thought we all agreed to forget that happened.”
“I don’t know why you’re being touchy about it,” she says. “I couldn’t even show up for work the next day. You’re the only one who got out in one piece.”
His dignity might have something to say about that, but that’s a story for another time. “I used to play volleyball,” Kousuke tells them. “There were a lot of… occupational hazards. I had my fair share of accidents. I guess I just got a lot better at avoiding them.”
A coworker furrows his brows. “That was in high school?”
“Well, you know teenagers,” he says with a shrug. “Everyone was still learning to control their freakishly long limbs. We made it to Nationals, too, so it’s not like we were just messing around.”
Someone whistles behind him. “That’s pretty cool.”
Kousuke nods sagely. “It sounds way cooler when you don’t know that one of my teammates got his hand stuck in the vending machine right before our third match.”
“A bunch of us are headed out for lunch in a bit, by the way,” another coworker pipes in. “We’d be more than happy to have you.”
When his stomach growls at the offer, Kousuke can’t find any reason to refuse. He typically settles for whatever’s available on-site when he doesn’t bring in his own bento, but it can’t hurt to come along. Everyone agrees to meet up front after depositing their things at the lockers and changing out of their work clothes.
Kousuke unstraps his hard hat, unfastens his utility belt, and tugs off his gloves. He has to stop himself from reaching down for knee pads that aren’t there. His phone vibrates against the bottom of his locker as he’s halfway out of his shirt. He discards the shirt and pulls a clean one over his head. He takes his phone and shuts his locker.
On the way out, he checks his notifications. There’s a summary of his daily horoscope, an email from his landlord, and three new messages from Aone. When he opens his message thread with his upperclassman, he finds a series of questions on auger boring and microtunneling. Kousuke hadn’t been particularly close with him in high school, but every so often, one of them would reach out regarding their field of work. It’s oddly reminiscent of having classmates ask to compare notes or homework answers.
He side-steps someone’s bag and ducks away from a coworker trying to pat him on the head while drafting his reply. “Too slow,” he mutters under his breath, pushing the door open with an elbow.
Someone gasps as he emerges from the locker room. “Sakunami-kun! What happened to your arms?”
“More importantly, is it contagious?”
Kousuke looks down, catching the blotches of red across his arms, and shrugs. “This happens all the time. It’s not a big deal,” he assures them, pocketing his phone. “I was playing volleyball last weekend, but it’s been a while, so my body isn’t really used to the impact anymore. It’s just some light bruising.”
“This happens all the time?” someone echoes incredulously.
“Volleyball is scary,” another whispers.
He laughs but doesn’t try to convince them otherwise. “I could show you guys a couple of things sometime. Maybe it’ll turn out better than basketball.” Although there would be no real gratification in beating amateurs, he kind of wants to see his coworkers fumble about on a volleyball court.
Someone pats him on the back—which he takes as a hard, hard maybe regarding his offer—and tells him to get in the car. Apparently, the nearest izakaya is no more than a five-minute drive away from the construction site and conveniently opens at noon.
It’s a little hard to concentrate over the sound of his coworker’s animated retelling of his most recent date, but he uses the time to finish typing out the rest of his reply to Aone. Before putting away his phone, he also sends a quick message to Moniwa to thank him for yesterday’s advice on more efficient stick welding. Kousuke has always had a lot of respect for his seniors, but it’s flattering to be regarded as an equal both on and off the court.
Lunch is a casual affair. He looks at pictures of his coworkers’ kids, listens to stories told through mouthfuls of food, and even cracks a topical joke or two himself.
When he finishes eating, he finds himself trying to convince his coworkers that he’s not impervious to disaster. “Koganegawa once set the ball directly to my face and I didn’t notice until it was too late. He wasn’t even supposed to be setting to me, though. I’m the libero—”
“What the hell is a libero?”
“—but it turned out fine! The nurse set my nose back straight and everything.”
In the middle of his explanation on the intricacies of high school volleyball tournaments, someone points to the hand he’s waving around and asks, “Where’d that one come from?”
His hand stills in the air. There’s a scar straight across his right palm. “A-Ah, this one?” He brings his hand to the back of his head and shrugs. “Koganegawa and I were working on a project together. He asked me if the soldering iron was hot enough, so I just… you know… checked.”
Some shake their heads in sympathy. Some get a good laugh out of misery. “We’ve all been there,” one of them says. A few others echo the sentiment.
“This friend of yours—Koganegawa, was it? He seems like the common denominator in these accidents,” someone points out.
He can’t help that being around Koganegawa for extended periods of time eats away at his remaining brain cells. “The project turned out great,” Kousuke diverts. “We designed a Days Since Last Accident counter for the team. We never got to double digits, though, so we ended up wasting an entire display panel.”
A few more anecdotes are weaseled out of him while others finish up. He doesn’t mind telling them about his first time babysitting for Sasaya, or how they almost lost Obara in Tokyo, or when Onagawa poisoned half the team with expired cup noodles. It’s only when he asks about his portion of the bill that he realizes it had been a ploy to distract him from paying.
He does brood about being misled on the ride back, but he also promises to join them for lunch more often.
The rest of the afternoon back at the site is relatively uneventful, with the exception of the concrete mixer breaking down halfway through a lay. There are no wrenches from deadly heights and certainly no volleyballs traveling at deadly speeds.
All in all, not a bad day at work.
He falls into step with one of his coworkers on his way out and asks about her plans for the night. He smiles at her apologetically when his phone disrupts their small talk. “Hey, I just got off work—”
Koganegawa cuts Kousuke off with some iteration of his name and a greeting so loud that his coworker flinches next to him.
Kousuke pulls the phone away from his ear as they approach a crossing and covers the receiver with a hand. “Sorry about him. Get home safely.”
She shrugs minutely, wishes him the same, and turns right as he continues forward.
He sighs. “Use your inside voice, Koganegawa.”
“OKAY!” Kousuke hears someone on the other side shush his friend. Koganegawa lets out an offended squawk in response. And then, barely above a whisper, “Okay…”
Catching up with Koganegawa is building a house of cards with a hurricane and playing with the debris. It’s spilt water flooding back into the tray. It’s a tree that falls where everyone can hear it. If nothing else, it certainly makes the train home more interesting.
Their conversation is cut short when Koganegawa has to leave for training, but the train is already pulling into Kousuke’s station anyway.
“Break a leg,” Kousuke tells him, stepping out onto the platform. “Not literally, though.”
On the other side, Koganegawa whines. “Let it go already!”
Kousuke grins as he hangs up.
When he finally arrives at his apartment, Kousuke undoes the laces of his boots carefully, whispers tadaima to no one in particular, and gets started on dinner. The seven minutes it took to get back from the station seem to be just enough time for Futakuchi to have crafted a particularly impassioned essay on renewable energy in the old team group chat. Kousuke reads through the messages while waiting for the water to boil.
They go back and forth for a while until Coach Oiwake tells them to shut up and go to sleep. Kousuke snaps a quick picture of his stove and captions it but dad, i’m hungry. Futakuchi sends several obnoxious kaomojis back at him. The lurkers even come out of hiding to tease him, knowing he has no real authority over them.
Kousuke smiles to himself, turning his phone face-down on the counter to focus on dinner. It’s kind of nice—knowing that the iron wall they built all those years ago still stands tall.