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Kojiro has been seizure free for seventeen years.
He thinks there’s a more exact number out there, months and days and hours that Kaoru can say with pinpoint accuracy, but Kojiro likes the fact a little more vague. It’s a background thing now, a small fact about himself instead of something that needs to occupy more of his time.
The scar above his lip is from the coffee table at his granny’s and his favorite tv show when he was growing up was Sailor Moon and at one point his Mom knew the name of every radiology tech from his hometown. It’s all old knowledge, things that Kojiro thinks about every once in a while when he passes the hospital or when he’s at his yearly checkup, but it’s not something he actively worries about.
Or, at least, it wasn’t something he actively worried about. It’s not even something he’s actively worried about right now. He’s more concentrated on the timing of the dishes finishing up on the stove than on anything even resembling his own health.
No matter how much the gremlins coming in for dinner won’t appreciate it, timing dishes properly is something Kojiro takes great pride in. Everything should be hot and ready at the same time. It keeps the pasta from being overcooked, the side dishes from being cold, and his own pockets lined with money from his very happy customers.
And even though they’ll never admit it, it keeps the kids (and Kaoru) happy. That’s something that Kojiro has learned he’ll take great strides to continue.
If only this headache would let him continue that. It’s an ugly one, starting at his right temple and traveling down to his opposite eye and for the second time in five minutes, he grumbles and presses his palm there to try and starve off the feeling. Nothing is finished yet, not the chicken not the vegetables not even the desserts he had set to bake in the oven, and he can’t well leave Miya in charge of the dishes. In the time it will take him to shove some tylenol down his throat, the kid will have found a way to burn half of it.
Probably to spite him for leaving him to watch it in the first place.
Still, he has to do something about this creeping migraine or else he’s going to burn something important. There’s already a burnt taste in the air from something he likely dropped early on, probably a stray noodle that fell off into the burner, that clings to the back of his throat like smoke. It’s a wonder that Miya hasn’t ribbed him about it yet.
Everytime a dish doesn’t come out quite right, or something isn’t perfectly to one of the kid’s tastes, there’s no end to the barrage of comments from them. The last time he messed up a traditional Canadian dish, Langa practically laid into him, no matter how many times Kojiro insisted that he made it exactly to the recipe’s specifications.
And that was for a dish he hadn’t made before. He doesn’t know what the kids would say, what Kaoru would say, if he messed up something as simple as chicken alfredo.
He’s going to learn though, the burnt taste in the back of his mouth persists, no matter how much Kojiro wipes around his stovetop and flips chicken he knows isn’t cooked yet, and the irritation only serves to increase the throbbing in his head.
It’s on his third time searching for this invisible burnt scrap of something that he realizes it.
He inhales once, mostly to yell at Miya to figure out the other group’s ETA, when that smokey-taste heightens along with the pounding in his head, and all at once, he’s ten years old on his family’s living room floor, Kaoru screaming for his mom as he helps Kojiro into recovery position.
All of a sudden he’s feeling the aura that predates a seizure, and it Doesn’t. Go. Away.
Kojiro snaps his mouth shut, and in the next second, jerks forward and turns off everything in the kitchen. The stove eyes, oven, even the blender that's sitting idle, waiting for him to dump in ingredients for the salad dressing. His heart hammers in his chest, fear fear fear, echoing in him in a way he hoped it never would again.
He’s going to have a seizure, and the only person here is Miya .
Kojiro’s going to be sick.
He takes a moment to collect himself, to shove his knuckles in his mouth and breathe through the panic filling his lungs. Maybe, maybe, this is just a fluke. He’s had a hard week, the restaurant has been picking up more and more customers recently, especially since Kaoru’s chosen it as his favorite place to take new clientele. The stress is probably getting to him. Yeah, that’s it.
He’s stressed out and this smell is nothing more than a memory, an idea that will fade in a few minutes as long as he breathes deeply and… and…
And nothing. The taste doesn’t stop and the headache doesn’t fade, and he can’t leave Miya alone in the restaurant. The kid has finally opened up to them enough to tell them of how often he’s left alone at home, how often he spends hours and days and even weeks without anyone to keep him company.
Kojiro can’t just walk out on him. It’ll break that trust that he and Kaoru and Hiromi have been slowly building for nearly an entire year.
But if the kid leaves of his own violation, that’s different. It’s… he runs a hand against his forehead, tries to think through the fog and panic filling his skull, it has to be different. He peeks around the corner, catches a glimpse of Miya sprawled out on one of the booths closest to the kitchen door, homework finished and Reki’s old gameboy in hand, and tries to think of a plan.
Kojiro isn’t firing on all cylinders now. He doesn’t even think he’s firing on one. When his seizures were more frequent, he remembers the minutes before them as blurry, indistinct moments, and this is no different, but one fact stands out crystal clear in his mind. Miya is important. This is going to scare him. Kojiro has seen seizures before, knows how even some young doctors and nurses will freeze for a moment before they figure out what’s going on. And Miya is a kid. He’s not trained in this.
Kojiro is going to terrify him with this. He needs to let him know that… that…
“It’s going to be okay,” he starts, stepping back into the dining room, and ignores the way Miya looks up from his game with a roll of his eyes.
“What are you even talking about?” Miya scoffs. Even that small sound grates at his ears, and makes Miya’s face scrunch up. “You look weird. You haven’t done anything to my dinner have you?”
He’s done everything. The food is probably inedible at this point. If the chicken isn’t still pink in the middle he’d be surprised, and the noodles are turning to mush in the water he was meant to take them out of two minutes ago and Kojiro finds very quickly that he doesn’t care about any of it. Right now, everything comes second to the headache ringing around Kojiro’s skull. It’s just as jarring and painful as he remembers, and he shoves his hand further against his temple to try and get the pounding to settle even for just a moment. Miya’s more alert now, setting his game aside to squint suspiciously up at Kojiro.
“What are you doing?” Miya’s voice is less concerned and more general teenage disgust. “Your face is gross.”
His face is pained, is what it is, but the kid doesn’t know what that looks like. Shouldn’t know anything about it at all, but there’s nothing Kojiro can do to stop this, no matter how much he wants to.
The only thing he can do is make sure that Miya isn’t here to watch it.
“It’s a-“ He swirls the start of seizure around on his tongue, disgusted at the word he hasn’t had to think about in years before switching gears entirely. “Listen Miya,” he tries to keep his voice light. “The food is going to take a little while longer. Why don’t you go upstairs to wait for the others? I’ve got a few more games up there that will work with that gameboy in that back closet.”
He doesn’t. Kaoru does, packed up nicely in his room that he plans on gifting to Reki and Miya for their birthdays. Kojiro had never been allowed to play them when he was younger, too many flashing lights, and when he got older had preferred to sit back and watch Kaoru instead of learning the complicated moves and jumps that Kaoru then had down to a science. But the lie should be enough to keep Miya busy for a few minutes, somewhere Kojiro knows he’ll be safe long enough for Kojiro to figure something else out.
He just needs to set Miya at a specific area and drag himself to a different one, where he can set his head down on something soft and hope this will pass without injury. Maybe even call Kaoru and let his friend’s voice soothe him in a way no one else’s could.
Miya, of course, doesn’t let it go that easy.
“Why would I wait up there?” he asks, eyes narrowed. “They’re going to be coming down here. I always wait down here for them.”
“Besides,” he says, and Kojiro knows he’s screwed by the suspicion and hurt in Miya’s voice. “Cherry says you never played, not even when you were kids. You’re lying to me.”
For all the right reasons, Kojiro thinks through a particularly rough spike of pain in his head. Because he loves this kid and he knows seeing this is going to scare him.
Because, because–
Because of something Kojiro can’t think of anymore, not without his head splitting open, he opts for shaking his head, not that he thinks doing so is going to do anything to mollify the kid. Miya looks more angry than hurt now, red starting to heat up on his cheeks.
“What are you making excuses to get me out of here now? Lying so that you do have to continue hanging out with some dumb kid even though you and Cherry and the slimes were the ones who kept dragging me to these stupid–”
Miya’s nearly screaming now, upset and anger born of something Kojiro has no idea how to explain, much less has the capacity to right now. Kojiro should answer him with something though.
He should, should , but the throbbing in his head is starting to crescendo and his mouth tastes like smoke and he needs to get down on the floor right now if he doesn’t want to crack his skull. He slides gracelessly to his knees, and because he knows from experience that won’t be enough touches his shoulder to the polished wood floors.
Above him Miya makes an odd noise that cuts through his own tirade, high-pitched and concerned, that Kojiro’s aching head can barely make out. It’s important that he acknowledges it, they’ve been trying to get the kid to open up to them for months, but it’s just as important that he unbuttons the front of his chef’s coat, before it becomes a much more pressing issue. He catches it with fumbling fingers, pulling at the fabric until it comes free with a pop he’ll regret later.
Buttons clatter against the floor, and then something else, sneakers squeaking against wood, as Miya drops to his side. His hands are out in front of him like he wants to touch but can’t, like he’s terrified of hurting Kojiro which is an all-around ridiculous idea to put his head around.
“What’s-“ he starts, then clicks his teeth together. He taps his shaking fingers against his thigh. “If this is some dumb prank to get out of making us dinner-“
He stops again when Kojiro doesn’t speak, clicking his tongue behind his teeth in worry. His panic is starting to set in, and Kojiro’s body seems to echo the idea, heart pounding in tune to his head.
He hasn’t had a seizure since he and Kaoru were twelve, when his doctors finally found a cocktail of meds that had him, hopeful, then excited, then practically ecstatic when months and months passed without so much as an aura. His life moved in new and wonderful leaps and bounds, in ways he had only dreamed of when he was younger and his mother would barely let him out of her sight. The first time his mom let him spend the night at Kaoru’s alone, the first time she let him skate, the first time she encouraged it, buying him a helmet and elbow pads and embarrassingly cheering him and Kaoru on at the park.
That ‘what-if’ that had always followed him through elementary school, the extra eyes on him during class that made him shift in his seat, the worry in his family’s gaze every time he so much as moved, all started to fade one by one, until his family had nothing to say to his and Kaoru’s crazy ideas and plans but a roll of their eyes and his sisters screaming at him that they were ‘such boys’.
Seventeen years of letting this fear fade out of view and now it was returning full force in his mind, in his body, in the kid who he was meant to be watching right now. Miya’s eyes are too wide in his pale face, darting frantically back and forth between Kojiro and his own hands like he’s supposed to be doing something right now. He finally settles on putting his hand on Kojiro’s shoulder, small fingers digging imprints in the fabric there.
“Somethings wrong,” he finally says, voice so sharp it’s practically brittle. “So stop just laying there and tell me what to do!”
There’s nothing to do, and that’s the problem. It’s a new seizure, but unless it lasts over five minutes Kojiro doesn’t need medication or at least, he didn’t when he was a kid, and besides, he doesn’t even have that medication in the first place and even if he did, he knows how his parents used to administer diazepam during an active seizure, and he’s not putting the kid through that, not now.
Still Miya is pressing on his shoulder, aching and worried and looking more like a kid than he ever allows himself, and Kojiro has to do something to calm him down.
“It’s okay,” he says because it’s going to happen soon, and Miya looks like he’s seconds away from crying. He swallows down the smoke to send him a reassuring smile. “Everything’s alright. Just call Kaoru okay?”
“Call Cherry for what ?” Miya hisses but pulls out his phone anyway.
Kojiro goes to answer him, or he thinks he does, or maybe he doesn’t. Whatever he tries to say is lost as he slips unconscious.
And then the seizure begins.