Chapter Text
It’s not really one big thing that makes Tsukishima Kei decide to up and ruin his life at 2 am on a Tuesday morning. It’s more a bunch of little things, like the trading cards and the convenience store and the getting told “fuck you” by a twelve-year-old that really push him over the edge.
Being a sports agent isn’t exactly a rough gig. All things considered, it might be the most glamorous job in the industry: a generous salary and first-class flights without ever having to break a sweat. Plus Kei thinks there’s something dignified about the anonymity, about being decapitated by cameras at post-game press events, appearing only in the corners of front-page sports section photos. He doesn’t need a grimy jersey for it to be obvious he belongs there; he radiates self-possession, looks overcome with ennui in a suit. He stands impatiently next to his clients during interviews, arms crossed, giving off the vibe that no one else’s job could come close to being as challenging as his, Olympic gold-medalists or not.
It’s a position of respect rather than prestige, which suits him. The athletes love the limelight more than enough for the both of them, anyway.
Between Kei and thirty-something other agents, Sports Management Nippon handles the careers of almost every Japanese athlete set to appear in Tokyo in 2020. SMN operates out of a too-tall, too-shimmery silver building in Sendai, chosen for its central location and low property taxes. Kei still feels uneasy when he looks at it sometimes—the exterior is made of so much reflective glass that on sunny days it seems to disappear against the cloudless sky. It’s the kind of building people are supposed to want to work in, and the inside is just as pompous and glossy.
His older brother, Akiteru, had laughed until there were tears in his eyes when he found out his unfriendly, unapproachable little brother—one who had never suffered fools lightly—had followed him into an industry based on caring about clients.
“It’s not about caring,” Kei had answered, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “It’s about pretending to care.”
This is the problem with Kei, though: having someone else tell him he can’t do something has always been way more irritating than just not wanting to do it.
Besides, it would be inaccurate to say that Kei doesn’t care about the job. When Kei was young it was true that his teenage listlessness had settled in earlier than average, and then overstayed its welcome. But he’s an adult now—he cares about some things. Like long hours that quash any room for a social life, and an office kitchen with fancy coffee, and more than making ludicrous amounts of money by itself, the jealous expressions of his doltish extended family members whenever they prodded him into admitting these ludicrous amounts of money. It has been pointed out to him more than once that if all he really wanted was to get rich, he could have just become a software engineer, given his preference for isolation. But computer science is just as troublesome as anything else, and Kei is more comfortable when he’s the smartest person in the room.
Still, it’s not like he particularly likes managing professional athletes. He never liked athletes, even when he was one, a pretty solid middle blocker on a pretty solid volleyball team in high school. They were self-centered and noisy and glib, especially when you got to the pro level. And now Kei is glib, too, trying to cover up all their glibness to the press—he’s the glibbest of them all.
So maybe if Akiteru hadn’t laughed at him when he called from his first day of work, wondering where his older brother’s fabled corner office was, Kei would have left the job long ago. But Akiteru had lied, and worse, he had laughed, and now here Kei is: in the unbearable position of not knowing what to do next.
Because honestly there are some troublesome things about this job, too, for sure.
If Kei were a better person, maybe the convenience store robbery would have been the last straw. Two bullets in the Lawson near Yagoto Station in Nagoya, one person injured. Not the kind of thing that happens in Japan. And not the kind of act a professional basketball player of all people—a role model, Kei had reminded the guy once they were behind closed doors, one whom Kei himself had secured a two-million dollar contract—should be perpetrating. Kei had left the office seething that night, knowing that his tepid scolding was the worst that guy was ever going to get.
Hell, if Kei were a better person—then the trading cards would have been the last straw. The scrawny kid had just wanted an off-brand card signed, one with a glaring typo in the left fielder’s name, even. A card no one would have tried to buy off of eBay. But the left fielder had known that Kei was hovering over his shoulder and replied nervously, “Sorry, I can only sign Topps-brand cards.” The kid hadn’t looked upset so much as confused, but then again, Kei didn’t really stick around to see.
Anyway, yeah—it’s the fuck you that really gets to him. Kei’s not a nice guy or anything. He’s charming, in a shallow way, because he has to be in this business, but it’s not anywhere near like this kid’s the first one to call him on his bullshit.
The kid’s dad, a hockey guy, is a vicious offensive player. Doesn’t hesitate to hurt anyone when it comes to scoring, including himself. This late night in the hospital isn’t his first concussion—his fourth, actually—but it is his first coma. And when he comes out of it, Kei is already there. Because he’s good at his job. As soon as the doctors shuffle out of the room, he drills the guy.
“How many fingers am I holding up?”
“Two.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m Miyama Kenji. I play for the Sendai Seahorses.”
“And when’s your birthday?”
“September…sixteenth?”
Close enough. Kei gestures to the man’s family, flanking either side of his bed. “And who are they?”
“My radiant wife Junko, and Kenji Jr.” The hockey player smiles. He’s on a roll.
“And who am I?”
The guy pauses, then his face lights up. “Of course.” He snaps his fingers. “You’re my agent!”
Kei isn’t sure whether the guy’s brain is really that scrambled or he if honestly doesn’t know his name. He can’t actually remember Miyama addressing him as anything but my agent at any point in time, but that isn’t necessarily a concussion thing. It might just be a Kei thing.
He nods at the guy. “Got anything else rattling around up there?” Somehow he doubts this.
Miyama is thoughtful, for a moment. “If I get just one more game in I get my bonus and my wife gets a boat.”
“That is accurate,” he replies. “You’ve got a whole week to rest up, so take it easy for now. Miyama-san,” Kei regards the wife, Junko, as he excuses himself from the cramped room.
Kei gets a can of coffee from the vending machine and leans against the wall, letting the encouraging smile fall from his face. It’s not that he really hates smiling, he just has to do it so much, and it’s more relaxing not to. Plus he knows he’s good at his job; he doesn’t need to smile about it all the time, once he finds a moment alone.
But the kid, Kenji Jr., walks up to the vending machine beside him and punches the button for a can of grape juice. He looks him dead in the eye as if Kei is the nonentity here. He stares back, even though it’s childish to challenge a kid like that, before he finds his smile again.
“Shouldn’t someone tell him to stop?” the boy asks, snapping the can of grape juice open with a hiss.
“Kenji Senior?” says Kei, smooth, easy. “Please, it’ll take more than a couple bumps to the head to hurt your dad. The whole Decepticon race couldn’t beat him.”
The kid breathes out through his nose. “Fuck you,” he says.
The kid is the spoiled son of an ice hockey player from some middle-of-fuck-nowhere town in Hokkaido. Kei wants to remind the kid that he’s the reason he and his mommy and daddy now summer in Hokkaido, the nice parts, but he’s too good to act on his temper.
Still, it hits him like a brick in the chest.
The way the kid looks at him, like he’s worthless, like he’s worse than worthless, like he’s pathetic—it’s the same way Kei looked at his own older brother, back when he found out why he left SMN.
As the kid stomps away, Kei feels the dread of an open space. In this too-long, too-empty hallway, he sees the last few years of his life, years he has been pointedly too busy to reflect upon, and realizes that yes, even on paper, a lot has gone wrong.
***
But he’s not gonna have a breakdown about it. Please.
He’s gonna have a breakthrough.
Kei wakes up in hotel forty minutes outside Sendai in the middle of the night and suddenly he can feel the air sharp on his skin, the way his fingers all move individually of one another, and—fuck, his feet are repulsively sweaty, did he fall asleep in his socks again?
For some reason it’s hilarious to Kei that the first thing he does, having woken up a new person, is tear off his gross sweaty socks. It’s so hilarious he doubles over laughing about it. Then he lurches off the bed, crawls over to the mini fridge, and basks in the cool and the bright light, like he’s blessing himself before—
Before what? For a moment he isn’t sure, opening and clenching his fists, and then he grabs the hotel stationery off the nightstand, stumbles into the rolling chair at the desk, and starts writing.
After the first couple of pages it occurs to him that typing would be much more efficient, and he laughs at himself again, wondering if he’s really Kei 2.0 or just fucking crazy. But the thought is pushed aside as he boots up his laptop and continues where he left off.
Once he starts typing, he finds he can’t stop. He feels like he’s watching his body from afar, and he knows these words are part of the real Kei because they’re coming out of him, but it’s not any part of Kei he’s ever seen before, one who uses words like empathy and well-being and passion.
But you know what? He’s being fucking honest. The industry is fucked, and Tsukishima Kei is smart, and he’s good at his job, and why shouldn’t people listen to him? So somehow two pages become twenty-five, and he’s adding in the handwritten part to the beginning of the document, giving the whole thing a hasty once-over, and popping it on a flash drive.
As he calls a cab on the hotel phone, he wonders again, for a moment, what he’s doing. But he shakes it off, because this has to be a good thing. How could it not be? For god’s sake, he’s almost thirty years old and he has finally decided to try.
He goes to the 7/11, makes up fifty perfect-bound single-color copies of his work, and hands two hundred-thousand yen bills to the clerk. His hand taps out a nonsensical rhythm on his thigh and he watches the light at the edge of the horizon. He can’t wait to explain it to the senior people at work tomorrow—their strategy is all wrong. It has been all along. This is no way to live. This is no way to treat people. It’s not just compassion, he tells himself. It’s business sense. Which he has. In scores.
“This,” the kid at the register says to him, “is a really great idea.”
They stare down at this thing he’s created, this thing that, just before the crack of dawn, Kei really and truly believes is going to make a difference.
THE THINGS WE THINK AND DO NOT SAY
(The Future of Our Business)
Have you ever wondered about the things that brought you to the place you stand today? Have you ever regretted any of them? Do you ever find yourself looking in the mirror, at your home, at the people you call your friends, and see nothing wrong—but still something is telling you: you can do better than this…
He passes them on to his assistant, Saeko, who of course wasn’t sleeping, what kind of weirdo is asleep at five in the morning—but hey, once she reads this manifesto, she’ll understand why it was so important in the first place.
The sun rises. Kei sinks back into bed, at last. As the edges of his consciousness begin to blur, he feels a million things at once, because he is certain he is a new person and that this new person can be good. He feels ecstatic and committed and honestly, kind of high, and something else strong and strange which he cannot identify, but he knows he writes because of this one thing, this complex thing he does not have the vocabulary to express, above any other.
Months later, Kei will realize this thing wasn’t so complex at all: he was lonely.
***
In the cold light of day, of course, Kei cannot fucking believe what he has done.
He has made some fucking clown moves in his life, sure, but he has always prided himself on making significantly fewer clown moves than would be considered average for one person.
On the nightstand his clock says it’s already past ten in the morning. He briefly considers suing the hotel for missing his wake-up call, even though the truth is he probably just slept right through it. Then he wonders if the hotel offers a hitman service, because Kei would really like to call it on himself right now.
He calls Saeko, just to check that yeah, the memos really did all go out, and yes, it looks like everyone is reading them right now, and he says, “No, no, of course it’s no problem. It’s fantastic. Just a typo, but that is definitely the draft I wanted to put out there. Thanks again.” He is not quite able to mask his sarcasm.
How did he make such an unnecessary, unprompted, unwarranted, and unprecedented mistake? He wasn’t even drunk.
Kei is tempted to take the longest shower of his life, but he’s always been the kind of person who prefers to rip the Band-Aid off fast when bad shit is coming his way. There’s no need to prolong his misery. If he’s walking in only so he can get fired and walk right back out, he might as well get an early start on the day of drunken, public Taiko Drum Master that is sure to follow.
When Kei arrives at his too-tall, too-shimmery building and rides the elevator to the third floor from the top, he gets the feeling he’s walking into an ambush. So he tries to stand even taller than usual, more dignified, maybe even unapproachable and intimidating, the way he had perfected as a teenager.
When he steps off the elevator, sure enough, everyone looks up. Most of them are holding his memos. Shit, he thinks. No, fuck. Does he know any curse words more emphatic than fuck? Because he feels that way right now—more emphatic than fuck. Panic climbs in his throat as he realizes there is no cool way for him to play off this colossal mistake.
But as he gapes, searching for words, something strange happens. Someone claps.
And that someone is followed by another person, and another, until pretty much every last one of his coworkers is showering him with applause, memos waving in their hands like pennants at a game. Which is mortifying, don’t get him wrong—but mortified is infinitely better than fired, and if Kei can get out of this mess just mortified, then he’s learned a cheap lesson.
What’s the lesson, exactly? he wonders. Maybe that genuine revelations never happen at two in the morning, or that he should throw his laptop out of his twenty-fourth floor apartment window.
His junior, Oikawa, comes up and claps him on the shoulder in his friendly way which, today more than ever, makes Kei want to sock him in the face. The action is way too bro-ish for either of them and Kei knows he knows it.
“You really went and said it, Kei-chan.” Oikawa smiles. “Let me take you out to lunch soon, ‘kay?”
Kei sighs. “As long as it’s not a sports bar.”
“Please, we’re too classy for sports,” Oikawa replies, releasing his shoulder. Kidding or not, he’s not exactly wrong.
Kei nods tersely at his colleagues as he navigates the cubicles to his corner office, trying his best to look humble, or collected, or anything but about-to-fucking-vomit, and he collapses at his desk like he’s just run a marathon with the flu. He has always tried to be cool, which in a way he guess counts as avoiding criticism. But he has also never known how to handle praise, and on three hours sleep he feels as if he’s aged fifteen years.
Maybe he should reconsider whether he's so different from Akiteru after all.
By the kitchen, away from the crowd, Kuroo Testurou peers at the door to Kei’s office.
“How long you give him?” Kuroo asks his assistant, exhaling through his nose as Kei closes the blinds.
Kenma doesn’t look up from his phone. “Mmm. A week.”
***
As Kei creeps out of his office that night, he half-expects to be taken out by a sniper. But there are no high-speed bullets, no pink slips. He is safe, maybe.
Still, he sees his memos in the wastebasket by the elevator door.
***
By the time the season’s basketball playoffs are over and the Sports Management Nippon people are filing on the plane back to Sendai, Kei has still encountered no consequences for his actions in addition to wild embarrassment. He hopes, cautiously, that people have already begun to forget about his memo, about the way he advocated for fewer clients, for stricter regulations. He still feels shame burn his skin when he remembers the hockey player’s son, so he isn’t convinced he was wrong, but if no one else agrees with him, then there is nothing he can do about that.
Miraculously, he doesn’t end up seated next to any of his coworkers. But he’s still surrounded by the other agents and senior people in rows nearby, all of them somewhat subdued by the busy weekend. He finds himself wishing he were seated with the assistants and accountants and other lower-level managers a few rows behind in economy. Like a middle-schooler kicked out from the popular table at lunch, he thinks, stuck throwing himself on the mercy of his nerdier peers.
His seat partner, it turns out, is a woman from one of the playoffs’ primary advertising firms. She still seems to be running on the high of a successful weekend. She’s younger than he is, so it’s possible this was her first event. She is friendly in a mature way that makes it hard for him to ask her to shut up, even though all he wants to do is sleep. Besides, he’s still well in earshot of all his most competitive coworkers, so it’s not safe to drop the fake-charming attitude just yet.
At least it’s a domestic flight, he consoles himself. Barring bad weather, it’s impossible for it to take more than two hours to get from any point A to point B in Japan.
“You’re with the sports people, too, right?” she asks.
“Yep,” he says.
“I’m with Kinshachi Promos.”
“Sports Management Nippon.”
“Wow.” She raises her eyebrows, dragging the word out in a way that Kei can tell is genuine. “You’re an agent, then? How’d your guys do?”
Kei shrugs. “Some better than others.”
“Any of them show up in my commercial?”
They compare client lists, and Kei finds it’s not such a horrible distraction, though putting on his headphones and falling asleep would be infinitely better. The woman is nice, though, and self-possessed, the kind of personality he had trouble making fun of even when he tried his hardest, back in high school.
At industry events Kei’s coworkers act jealous of him for the attention he sometimes receives from young women. He always rolls his eyes at this—he’s pretty positive it only happens because he’s gay, and thus nonthreatening. They’re pretty much never actually into him—he just doesn’t give off the same creepy, overly assertive vibes they do, so he’s relatively approachable. Not that any of his macho blockhead coworkers could wrap their heads around that.
Kei and the advertising women find out they have a basketball player in common, and they talk about his season. The conversation seems to die, and Kei rummages around his bag for his headphones, a little relieved, when the girl leans in conspiratorially and says, “Hey, can I get your opinion on something?”
***
A few rows back, in economy, Yamaguchi Tadashi hears warm, easy laughter from the front of the plane.
“Boy problems are so embarrassing,” the young woman’s voice rings out.
“Not really,” says the man, his voice so flat it’s hysterical. “Everyone’s got boy problems.”
He bites his tongue to keep from blowing his cover. The woman laughs again, then the volume of the conversation drops. He furrows his brow. No fair. They’re obviously discussing all the really juicy details now, and Tadashi will be damned if he doesn’t get to hear when it’s the man’s turn to share his worst date ever.
Tadashi quietly unbuckles his seatbelt and strains forward, until he is almost out of his seat. He thinks he hears something about a rowboat, but it could also be a robot, and either way it’s way more interesting than any date he’s ever been on.
Next to him his kid jolts up abruptly to sneeze three times in a row.
Tadashi makes a sympathetic noise—his poor baby. It seems like he has a new cold every month. “You’re a trooper, Yaku,” he tells his son, patting his hair. “When we land we’ll get you fixed up with some hot cocoa. A big hot cocoa.”
“With sprinkles?” Yaku asks, his consonants muddled by congestion.
“You don’t put sprinkles in hot cocoa,” Tadashi says. Then he nudges him and adds, “Well, not without whipped cream, anyway.”
Yaku sneezes once more in response, nuzzling his runny nose into his father’s sweater. He curls up, head lolling forward after only a moment. Tadashi smiles at him adoringly. He really is a good kid.
Then he laser-focuses his attention back on the gossiping couple from business class.
***
“So I told him,” Kei continues, “that if I really meant anything to him at all, he would stay the hell away from me.”
“No!” the girl squeaks, but she’s smiling bigger than ever. “And did he?”
“Obviously not.” Because the guy isn’t real.
Lying is a better distraction than not-completely-painful small talk, and easier. The advertising woman is totally enchanted, and he’s never gonna see her again once they step off the plane, so he makes an effort to up the stakes of his sweeping, fictional college romance. She’s so excited Kei wouldn’t be surprised if she burst into a shower of confetti, which shouldn’t annoy him, but sort of does, and it makes him want to lie even more.
“So what happened next?” Nothing.
“It’s embarrassing.”
“Please?” She flutters her eyelashes jokingly. Might as well.
“Well, it involved a motorcycle, a championship soccer team, and a lot of expensive champagne.”
***
There is one person who likes Kei’s story more than the advertising woman, and that person is Yamaguchi Tadashi. While the stewards aren’t looking, he kneels on the floor, pretending to look for a fictional contact, straining to hear the rest of this guy’s swoon-worthy, heart-fluttering romance.
Behind him, Yaku wakes up again, his voice groggy and confused. “Dad…?” he asks. Tadashi looks back at him and pats his knees, which are cold to the touch in the plane’s icebox climate.
“Shh, not now. Daddy’s eavesdropping.”
Yaku coughs and Tadashi shoves more tissues in the direction of his beloved, but at present, significantly less interesting, son. He tries to look sympathetic to his sick kid, but he can’t stop smiling at the man’s deadpan delivery of his love life.
“But in the end it didn’t work out. It didn’t matter what we had done for each other. We weren’t right.”
“You’ve really got it all figured out, huh, Kei-kun.”
“Hardly,” the man, Kei-kun, says. There’s a pause, and Tadashi thinks the conversation may be over. Then he speaks again: “I mean, I’m going to see him tonight for the first time in years, at this insufferably romantic restaurant in downtown Sendai.”
The girl squeals. “You jerk! You’re so bad.”
Tadashi frowns. He moves back into his seat, pulling the seatbelt taut.
“What’s wrong, Dad?”
“First class is what’s wrong,” Tadashi mutters.
“Okay,” Yaku says, stifling a yawn and curling back into his chair.
Tadashi sighs. He should probably have been doing work, anyway—he missed a lot because of the playoffs, and tomorrow he has to go into the office again. He pages through his binder, pausing between a receipt and a printout of a spreadsheet. His hand hovers over the memo passed out at the office a week before, cover already worn.
***
Practically the first thing Tadashi does when he gets off the plane is lose his cold-ridden kid.
“Yaku?” he calls out for the hundredth time, as he weaves his way through well-dressed sports people mingling and waiting for their baggage. “Yaku, I swear to god, if you don’t come back this instant, I’m gonna—”
“Gonna what?” Kei asks. Tadashi whirls around.
“Use my outdoor voice,” he squeaks. The guy has the same voice as the Kei-kun from the plane, meaning the guy who told those stories is the stoic guy from his office is the guy who wrote the memo he is currently clutching like a megaphone in a desperate search for his son. The equation fizzles his brain for a moment, and he wonders if it’s possible to literally die from embarrassment.
“Aren’t you already?”
He rubs the back of his neck with his hand. “Fair.”
“I’m not an expert on kids,” Kei says, “but have you tried looking”—he glances over Tadashi’s shoulder, toward the luggage conveyor belt—“over there?”
Tadashi spins around again, fast, and he is sure if this keeps happening he is going to get dizzy and throw up all over this cute guy who he knows is also a) smart, b) into dudes, and c) his savior, seeing as he just spotted Yaku, who is taking a nap on someone’s luggage and getting plenty of odd looks from the other people in Domestic Arrivals.
“Yaku!” he shouts, his voice squeaking again. Yaku looks up and climbs down carefully, ambling toward his exasperated father. Tadashi is furious, but more importantly he is relieved, and he kisses his son on the face before he can remember his highly contagious cold.
“Thank you,” Tadashi breaths, careful not to turn around too fast to face Kei again. He is surprised to see Kei is already leaving, apparently trying to make a quiet escape. He looks up, expression a little pained.
“Don’t mention it.”
Tadashi smiles, then kneels in front of his son. “Yaku, do you remember the word imagination?” he asks. Yaku nods. “Okay, well, I want you to imagine me screaming at you right now, like I would if Daddy’s coworker weren’t here. So you should say ‘thank you’, too.”
Yaku walks over to Kei and grabs his leg. At first Kei thinks it’s a hug, but apparently he thinks he’s a human jungle gym. He latches on and starts to shimmy up. Kei stiffens. Referring to himself as no expert earlier was a gross understatement. Tadashi watches the exchange with more amusement than apology.
“I’m Yamaguchi, by the way,” he says. “Yamaguchi—”
“Tadashi,” he finishes the sentence. Kei tries quickly to move past the fact that he has never addressed this guy before in his life and just inadvertently called him by his first name. He saves it: “I know. You work in accounts with Shimizu-san. You have a poster of a Saturn V rocket on your cubicle.”
Tadashi’s stomach flips at this guy knowing what a Saturn V rocket looks like. “Pretty good.”
“And I’m—”
“I know who you are,” Tadashi says quickly, holding up the memo in his hand. “I liked your memo, by the way.”
“Is that so?” Kei says. Yaku is making progress up his leg, and he desperately hopes that his kid doesn’t accidentally grab his colleague’s butt.
“Yeah, it was…inspiring,” he says. “And very honest. I think it’ll really change some minds.”
Kei pushes his glasses up, purposefully obscuring his face. “Is that so?” he repeats.
“I mean, it changed mine. That part about truly seeing our clients, as well as ourselves, as complex and fully-formed human beings—” Tadashi is quoting his memo directly back to him, and suddenly Kei could just die.
“Please, Yamaguchi-san,” he mumbles into his hand, which he presses flat to his face. They are still surrounded by SMN people and Kei prays none of them can see him losing his cool.
“Sorry, Tsukishima-san. I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”
His hand drops from his face. He isn’t smiling anymore, but his shoulders relax. “Yeah, well. I brought it upon myself.” He sighs and pats Yaku’s hair, motioning for the kid to climb down. “I’ll see you at the office, Yamaguchi-san.”
“Have fun on your date,” Tadashi calls after him.
Kei screws up his face.
“At the restaurant. With your dashing ex-lover.”
“Oh. You heard—on the plane?” Kei says. Oh my god. “That story wasn’t true.” He can feel himself wince on the last word.
This makes Tadashi feel a few things at once, with surprising intensity—first there’s the relief that this hot tall guy isn’t going on a date tonight, because anyone on a date with him would definitely ask him out a second time; then there’s the confusion about why the earnest person who wrote the memo in his hands would lie so boldly; then there’s the embarrassment of having admitted that he was eavesdropping the whole time.
“Oh,” he says. “Sorry, Tsukishima-san.”
Kei sighs, stepping closer so he can keep his voice low. “It’s nice you read my memo, but that’s not really the person I am. It’s more like…someone I’m trying to be.” He looks away. “I guess old habits die hard.”
“Maybe not as hard as you think,” Tadashi offers helpfully.
He finds himself considering this. “Yeah. Maybe you’re right.”
As Kei disappears into the crowd—well, never really disappearing, his blonde hair floating inches above everyone else—Tadashi feels a tap on his shoulder.
“Did you pull your luggage off the conveyor belt yet,” asks Akaashi, “or were you planning on flirting in front of your son for few more minutes?”
“Keiji!” Tadashi exclaims. “No, I—I haven’t gotten the luggage yet. Help me get it into the car?”
“That’s what brothers are for,” Akaashi says. The eye roll is implied. “Come on, collect your offspring and I’ll take the suitcase. You should really considering investing in a leash for that kid.”
Tadashi sticks out his tongue, but he isn’t wrong—Yaku has already begun to wander again, crouching in front of a potted plant. Tadashi sweeps him up before he can stick his hands in the dirt.
Suitcase in hand, Akaashi tilts his head toward the door. “We’d better go. I left Asahi parked illegally and I’m worried he’ll pass out from the stress if we don’t hurry.”
Tadashi winces. “You should be nicer to him.” Akaashi shrugs and leads the way. Tadashi eyes his clothes and giggles. “Did you forget to take off your scrubs?”
He looks down. “Shit, not again.”