Work Text:
“Not today, dude.”
It’s the first thing Shin says the moment Natsuki steps through the door of Sakamoto’s; Before he can even get a word out, Shin is glaring at him from behind the counter like he’s ready to break the no-kill streak just from his presence.
Natsuki barely reacts, of course, because Shin hasn’t been nearly as threatening as he looks since they got over the whole kidnapping debacle. “You asked for me to come,” he points out as he approaches the counter.
“A week ago. You should’ve come then.”
“I was busy.” Natsuki looks at the wares on the counter, fiddling with a display of lighters. The act makes Shin’s nose twitch. “You wanted some adjustments to your glove, right?”
“Go to hell.” It hardly seems like a reasonable reaction, and Natsuki is getting close to actually asking what his deal is when Lu bursts from the back with a box in her hands.
“Oh, Seba!” She shoots him a grin, and Shin winces at the sound of her voice. “Shin, you didn’t say he’d be coming by!”
Natsuki nods, humming his hello. “I’m just dropping in.”
Shin frowns at both of them. “Since when did you two become buddies, after all the mess Seba put you through?”
She shrugs as she sets down the box. “I got over it.” When she stands and looks back at Natsuki, it’s with a sympathetic smile. “Don’t worry about him—he quit smoking a few days ago, and he’s being a big baby about it. You should just leave him alone.”
“Don’t tell him that,” Shin snaps, and Natsuki is sure they’re going to get into their regular cat and dog fights, but he doesn’t really feel like sitting back and watching this one.
“Why are you quitting?”
Shin leans his hip against the counter, crossing his arms with a huff. “Hana found out I smoked, and she freaked out about how I was gonna drop dead from lung cancer. Then she decided she was hunger striking until I gave it up. Obviously, that didn’t last too long.”
“Yeah, so now he’s gonna be a horror to be around for a while,” Lu says from where she's stocking goods. “He can barely even do his job like this.”
“Come on, I’m still doing better than you ever-“
“Hey,” Natsuki says, “I can help you out, if you want.”
Shin swivels to bore his eyes into Natsuki. “Why do you think I need help?”
Natsuki grabs one of the lighters, holding it in front of Shin and watching his face sour. “It’s pathetic to watch you lose your mind just from looking at these.”
Instantly, Shin averts his eyes, but it’s not like it undoes his previous reactions. “Clearly, this isn’t the place to take your mind off things. I can help you find better ways to distract yourself, at least.”
“And why the hell would you want to do that?”
Natsuki sets back the lighter with a shrug. “You’re a pretty good guinea pig. I’d like to keep you healthy.”
Natsuki is saved from whatever explosion that comment might’ve brought when Lu smacks her hand on Shin’s back before he can speak. “Sounds like a great idea to me! I can run the place just fine today. You two have fun, alright?”
Shin looks back and forth between them once, twice. Whatever math he's doing in his brain must weigh ever so slightly in Natsuki’s favor, because he unties his apron without any more of a fight.
#
Shin leans back in his chair, far enough to tip over, Natsuki thinks, though he doesn’t say anything. “I don’t see how this is any better than me being in the store.”
“I’m trying to handle things in order,” Natsuki explains, but it’s clear Shin doesn’t appreciate the pragmatism. He brought him upstairs to adjust Shin’s glove like he asked, thinking he’d be better off in his own room than in front of the cigarette display, at least.
Evidently, that wasn’t enough; Shin has never been one to sit still, exactly, but even this is more fidgety than usual. And he really was going to fall over, if he tipped that chair any farther. There’s a lingering scent of smoke, faint but noticeable on the clothes hanging from the door. It can’t exactly be helping.
“Have you tried gum?”
“Huh?” Shin settles the chair down, finally, and Natsuki mourns that he won’t get to see him fall to the ground. “Oh—yeah. It didn’t really work. I went through a whole pack in like 20 minutes.”
Natsuki watches as Shin stands, beginning to pace the room—Natsuki’s already watched him make his rounds twice, by now. He looks back to the glove on the desk, his tools strewn out beside it. “Anything else you usually do to distract yourself?”
“Isn’t that what you said you’d be helping with?” Shin is sitting on the bed, now, leg bouncing. It’s a miracle that he can be even more keyed up than usual, Natsuki thinks.
Well, he supposes he can finish the adjustments later; It’s only a few odds and ends anyway. He stands up and grabs a rag to wipe any excess oil from his hands. “I guess you need some kind of physical distraction.”
Shin hums, in the affirmative, maybe—it’s hard to tell. He flops back on the bed to stare at the ceiling. “Maybe. Got any ideas?”
Natsuki sets the rag down and steps closer, placing one knee on the bed so he can lean in and see Shin’s face. His eyes shift to glare at Natsuki for getting in his space. It doesn’t deter Natsuki from getting closer by propping himself up with a hand next to Shin’s head. “Well, physical distraction usually means sex.”
Lucky for him, Natsuki is close enough to see Shin’s face bloom pink in an instant. His mouth falls open, and he’s entirely still for the first time since Natsuki got here.
“Or any kind of exercise, I guess,” Natsuki continues. Natsuki knows he can keep a straight face, but it’s pretty useless to try against Shin, who must’ve tuned in the moment Natsuki caught him off guard: His eyebrows scrunch together with concentration, and his lips pull into a line a moment later, realization morphing his expression back into annoyance.
“You’re such an ass,” Shin mutters, and Natsuki doesn’t doubt it, but it’s hard when Shin is this easy to tease.
“Come on,” he says, leaning back a little. “Let’s go on a run or something.” Shin has always been like a hyperactive cat, Natsuki thinks, so there’s a chance that letting him tire himself out will get him to relax.
“I heard that,” Shin snaps, as he kicks Natsuki off.
#
Unfortunately for Natsuki, exercise is probably exactly what Shin needed.
Even on a normal day, Natsuki didn’t particularly want to keep up with Shin. It wasn’t that he couldn’t, but that the effort Shin put in was always too much to bother with—so now, with Shin clinging to this run like his life depended on it? Natsuki would’ve been exhausted just thinking about it. And he’s just as exhausted in real life, running behind an overeager Shin through the streets around Sakamoto's.
Shin looks back at him with a grin, clearly pleased at the distance between them. “Cmon, try and keep up,” he says, and Natsuki loses any will he might’ve had left to keep going.
He grabs onto the back of Shin’s shirt and slows to a stop, dragging them both back. “Don’t you need a break? Aren’t your lungs, like, compromised?”
He snaps back to look at him, obviously irritated with the interruption. It doesn’t seem fair that between the two of them, the one who’s on day three without a cigarette isn’t the one fighting for his breath. “I’m feeling way better.” It seems true, too; His attitude has improved back to his normal level of snappiness, and he looks at Natsuki with a lot more clarity. “You’re the one who looks like he needs a break.”
Natsuki ponders that, before giving Shin a nod. “Okay, then how about-”
“I’m not carrying you.”
“You didn’t even let me say it,” Natsuki sighs. Damn clairvoyant. “You carried me out of the lab once, right? It wasn’t that bad. And it’ll help you with your workout.”
Shin props a hand on his hip, looking over Natsuki, like he’s trying to figure him out—like he doesn’t already have a way to figure out everything going on in his head. “Why’d you even offer to do this, if you couldn’t keep up?”
Natsuki wishes he had a satisfactory answer to that. He knows, really, that Shin could take care of himself. There had been no real reason for Natsuki to stick around with him the whole day, when he would’ve ultimately been just fine without him around. He had no reasoning to bother helping in the first place, despite any teasing about healthy guinea pigs.
So why had Natsuki done any of this, despite it all being a pain?
He looks away, not particularly interested in meeting Shin’s intense eyes this time. “Alright—yeah, I’ll head back. I’m beat.”
Shin catches him by the arm. “You’re kidding. You can’t just ditch me now!”
“I can do whatever the hell I want.” Natsuki tries to shake him off his arm, but only barely; Ultimately, Shin keeps his grip. “I can finish off your glove while you’re out here. That’s why you called me at first, anyway.”
It doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, but Shin is staring up at him with way too much concentration. It’s starting to freak Natsuki out, actually.
“You know I can tell what you’re doing,” Natsuki says, and Shin almost looks surprised, as if he wasn’t just looking at Natsuki like he was trying to make his head explode. “What are you trying to figure out, anyway?”
Shin blinks at him. “You really don’t have a clue.”
“Huh?”
“You don’t know what’s going on in your own head at all! Like, it’s too much of a pain for you to figure out why you’re thinking something, so you don’t even bother!” Shin lets go of his arm, but only to shove him by the shoulder with just enough force to show off his frustration. “If you don’t even know what’s going on yourself, how am I supposed to read your mind, huh?”
Natsuki still feels like he’s missing something here. “Sorry that my thoughts are too simple for you to get anything out of them,” he says, raising a hand in mock surrender.
Shin grabs that hand with a sigh, starting to drag him down the street. “Come on,” he says, nevermind the fact that he hasn’t told Natsuki where he’s going, now he’s turning to wheel them into an empty alleyway, and oh shit, maybe Shin really is going to break the no kill streak and Natsuki is his first victim-
With slightly more gentleness, Shin presses Natsuki back against the alley wall, caging him in. “You’re attracted to me.”
“What?”
“That’s what I thought! But you volunteered to spend time with me for no reason-”
“Because we’re friends.”
Shin is looking at him like he’s an idiot. Natsuki supposes one of them has to be. “Would you let me finish? You knew I was going to be—keyed up today.” So Shin was looking into his head back then, too. “But you volunteered to do all this, even though you clearly didn’t want to. And you pulled that stunt back in my room. You’re like those boys in school pulling ponytails, and you don’t even realize it.”
Shin’s cheeks are red once again, despite all his big words. Natsuki wonders just how much trouble he’s putting himself through to try and explain all this.
“You could be projecting,” Natsuki offers, because he feels like he has to offer some kind of rebuttal, after being cornered like this. “What if you’re just looking for what you want to see?”
Shin gives him that look again, and Natsuki knows he’s peering into his head. “You don’t really think that, though.”
No, Natsuki thinks. He doesn’t.
Shin takes a step back, to give one of them a little more air—Natsuki isn’t sure who between them needs it the most. “It smells like smoke in here,” he says, and that’s all it takes for Natsuki to realize that it does. Some secluded alleyway probably isn’t the best place to escape his cravings.
“You should get back,” he offers. Sakamoto’s would at least be better than this, he has to assume.
Shin presses in closer once again, though—a little less than last time, like he’s only getting sheepish about the situation now. “I was thinking,” he says, and he tucks the hair spilling in front of his face behind his ear, which just feels like playing dirty in Natsuki’s opinion. “I had a different distraction in mind.”
“Yeah?” Natsuki places a hand on Shin’s hip, lightly, trying to coax him just a little closer without scaring him away. “What’s that?”
If Natsuki were to really think about it, he’d see no other way it could’ve gone, in the end. Natsuki was never the greatest at talking things through, and Shin has always seemed like more of a physical learner, anyway.
Shin is the one who closes the distance, and Natsuki is the one who chases his lips like his life depends on it, when Shin finally starts to come up for air.
If Shin has anymore trouble with quitting, the Sakamoto household can at least rest easy in the fact that from now on, it's Natsuki’s problem.