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Raichi considers himself to be a sensible man. Sure, sometimes he’s a little too loud and maybe he has a bit of a hot temper, but all in all, he is more level-headed and pragmatic than practically everyone else he knows. He’s not the one going around asking people mid-game if they’re ready to die (looking at you, Isagi). He’s not the one sporting a brand new personality after a brutal summer internship ( cough Kunigami cough ). And, most importantly, he’s not the one who turns an accidental self-foul into a knock-down drag-out fistfight.
That honor can only go to Shidou and Rin.
No, Raichi is the guy who steps in to try and stop them all from getting red-carded so that the team still has a chance at championships. And what thanks does he get?
A wrist crushed under Rin’s fat ass while the two fuckers who started the fight get off completely scott-free. Effectively, that is, because by the time Rin’s nose and Shidou’s toe heal enough for them to play again, their three-game suspensions will be long over.
“Welcome back,” Kiyora says placidly as Raichi takes his seat on the bench for the game against Yokohama.
To an outside observer, it’s just a friendly greeting, but Raichi knows that little shit is making fun of him for losing his place as a starter, even if it is temporary. It better be temporary. Raichi eyes Kurona’s little pink braid warily as he runs to his position just behind the centerline. Raichi’s position.
“You better defend with your fucking life, baby shark!” Rachi yells out across the field. He isn’t sure if Kurona can hear him or not, but he does get a double thumbs up from the munchkin.
Raichi isn’t used to sitting on the sidelines. He hasn’t had to since he pulled a muscle in his back two seasons ago, but this is infinitely worse because he could be out there, he just isn’t because of the dumbasses currently seated at opposite ends of the sideline. He spends the entire game alternating between yelling himself hoarse and barely stopping himself from gnawing on his water bottle.
They don’t lose, which is good. They also don’t win, which frustrates the hell out of Raichi because he just knows if those two knuckleheads had evolved beyond kindergarten tactics of dealing with their feelings, they should have won this one. Yokohama is the bottom of the barrel.
Raichi deals with his own anger in a healthy way: at a bar, like a fucking grown up. He also gets wasted and throws up in a dingy bathroom stall. Like a fucking grown up.
He feels like shit warmed over but manages to drag himself back home a little after midnight. His housemates, who are all decidedly not suspended (the spineless bastards), are sober and asleep by that time, if the dead silence is any indication, which means there’s no one to take pity on him. He has to drag his own sorry self into the kitchen to scrounge up something to soak up the lingering alcohol so he isn’t completely useless during training tomorrow. He may not be allowed to play, but he still needs to remind everyone why that is a travesty.
He peers into the fridge and sees nothing that immediately screams ‘EAT ME,’ so he starts pulling out whatever he can get his hands on. Only when his hands land on the last two slices of bread in the sleeve does the picture start to form
Bread, lettuce, sliced eggs, tomato, what is that? Pork? Beef? Whatever, it’s meat. Unless it’s that weird tofu that Chigiri likes in which case fuck that, but what’s Raichi going to do amidst his sandwich stacking frenzy? Stop and taste it? No, no, this thing is in the hands of the gods now. By the time he makes it to the condiments, Raichi is nearly in a trance, bottles and jars he swears he’s never seen before flying out of the fridge and cupboards to grace his sandwich with their contents.
And then it’s done. His creation stands two full hands-width tall. It’s magnificent. All he has to do is slap the last slice of bread on top, but he never gets that far.
If the blazing white glow and sharp smell of burning pine are any indication, Raichi managed to fuck something up. Badly. He takes a step back and frantically tries to remember what to do in this situation. Wood fire? Water. Grease fire? Smother with a lid. Spontaneously combusting sandwich? Well, cowering in the corner while holding a tea towel over your nose doesn’t seem like it will work, but somehow it does anyways, because between one moment and the next, the kitchen is suddenly fire- and smoke-free. This would be a good thing if not for the fact that something else takes their place.
Raichi definitely does not let out a girlish scream before throwing the tea towel at the towering creature that just appeared out of thin air.
Now, he isn’t what one would call the outdoorsy type. If Raichi’s going out, it’s to the city where there’s interesting people and good food and fun things to do that aren’t getting eaten alive by mosquitoes. Still, he can recognize a bear when he sees one and he knows what is most definitely not normal bear behavior.
Here is a good example: a normal bear does not stand on its back legs while closely inspecting the tea towel it snatched out of mid-air, held delicately at the tip of its ten-centimeter long claws. A normal bear also does not tuck said towel into its fur, making it disappear .
Raichi stares at the bear.
The bear stares back.
“Hello,” the bear says, and Raichi definitely does not scream again.
The silence afterwards is punctuated only by the pounding of Raichi’s heart as the useless jelly of his brain fails to produce a single viable course of action.
“Are you okay?” the bear asks after a moment, in a voice that’s deep and measured and very un-bear-like. And great, the bear is worried about him .
“Uh, fine,” Raichi manages to produce because where he may not have any bright ideas he at least has manners . “How are you?”
“I’m hungry.”
Are there any worse two words that could come out of the mouth of a talking bear? Despite his expectations, however, there is zero mauling or rending of limbs or tearing of flesh.
There is, however, an unfinished sandwich.
Raichi slowly reaches a hand out to place the last slice of bread on top of the precarious stack of fillings before scooting the entire plate in the bear’s direction. The porcelain scraping over tile sounds inordinately loud in the silence.
The bear’s head tilts down, beady eyes unblinking.
“It’s a - uh - sandwich,” Raichi says. “You eat it.”
“ Oh .” There’s definite interest there, or maybe it’s just Raichi’s desperate optimism that the sandwich could possibly be more appealing than the 184cm of meat and bone that he fondly calls his own. Just in case, he starts to edge his way along the counter, eyes flicking to the dark portal of the hallway. He’s not sure if he can outrun a bear if it comes down to it, but he sure as hell can try.
“And what do you want in return?”
This freezes Raichi mid-step because he thought the trade off was pretty obvious. The bear eats the sandwich and Raichi gets to keep breathing for another day. That clearly isn’t what the bear is expecting though.
“What do you have?” Raichi sure as fuck isn’t going to try and ask for something that the bear can’t give him because this deal going south is pretty high on his list of things he does not want to happen.
The bear’s head tilts slightly to one side.
“I can fix that.” A single, razor-sharp claw pokes out, directed down and a little to Raichi’s right. Raichi frantically searches the kitchen floor for a moment before he catches a glimpse of his own wrist ensconced in a bright purple cast.
He holds it up in front of him. “This?!?”
“Yes.” The bear stares at him. Raichi stares back.
“Okay,” he says.
“Okay,” the bear repeats back.
Raichi isn’t sure what he expected to happen at this point. Maybe some chanting or sparkly lights or even the chance that this was some elaborate lead up to getting eaten anyway. It definitely wasn’t this: the bear places one paw on each side of its head like it’s a cartoon character with brain freeze. And then with one loud pop, it lifts its head off its shoulder.
Raichi goes down like a sack of bricks.
“LSD?” a voice says in the darkness.
“His shirt’s still on,” another voice replies.
“Molly.”
“He’s not lying in a puddle of his own puke, so I’m going to say no.”
“You don’t think he got roofied, do you?”
A snort. “Who would want to roofie Raichi?”
“Hey!” Raichi says, voice dragging out of him in a scratchy mess. Opening his eyes is a mistake. “Plenty of people want to roofie me. Who wouldn’t want a ride on the Raichi train? This baby can go all night!”
“You owe me two thousand yen,” Chigiri says, turning in his seat to spoon more cereal into his mouth.
Kunigami sighs and takes a sip of his coffee, leveling an unimpressed look Raichi’s way. “Fifteen more minutes, man. You couldn’t do me a solid?”
“What the fuck?” Raichi protests, propping himself up on one hand and rubbing at his eyes with the other. “You two were betting on how long I would be passed out?”
“No,” Chigiri says, pointing his spoon at him. “We were betting on if you would miss your first lecture.”
Raichi whips his head around to look at the clock on the microwave and immediately regrets it. What little is in his stomach threatens to reintroduce itself to his mouth. Nausea isn’t enough to keep a good man down, though, not when he’s one more failing grade away from not only having to take intro philosophy again the next semester, but getting suspended from the team for not fulfilling the basic course requirements.
“Shit! And you were going to let me sleep through it?” Raichi groans.
“Hey, I told you it was a bad idea to go out with Igarashi last night. You brought this on yourself,” Chigiri says with a shrug.
Raichi levels his glare at Kunigami who pointedly looks out the window. Before he found himself a not-boyfriend, Chigiri would have been right there with him at the bar. Damn goody-two-shoes Kunigami and his good influence.
Raichi is going to find a way to get back at them. Who just sits there eating breakfast while their teammate slash housemate lies passed out on the ground? Psychopaths. But he has bigger dragons to slay, like whatever horrors Professor Noa is going to introduce in today’s quiz.
He grabs onto the countertop to haul himself off the ground only to face a whole new indignity.
“Hey!” Chigiri shouts, halfway out of his seat.
Kunigami follows this up with “Be careful!”
“What is wrong with you two?” Raichi says, bewildered.
“Um.” Chigiri stares at the hand that Raichi has clamped around the counter. “That didn’t hurt?”
“What, of course not!” Raichi isn’t an invalid. He can climb his own ass off the floor without help. And then he remembers. He lifts his hand off the counter, his right hand. An experimental twist of his wrist inside his cast feels, well, nothing. Normal. It doesn’t hurt at all.
Bursts of memory from the previous night flash through his mind.
“Holy shit,” Raichi whispers. “Magic talking bear.”
Chigiri glances over at Kunigami. “Shrooms.”
Raichi is a sensible man. He does not believe in talking bears. He does not believe in magic. And yet he can’t deny the fact that his wrist is in fact fixed. A frantic nonsensical phone call to his doctor resulted only in a severe recommendation for bedrest so he’s here instead.
“Just do it!” Raichi growls.
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” Kurona says. “Bad, bad.”
Both of them freeze as footsteps approach the door to the empty exam room at the school clinic where Kurona volunteers for pre-med credits.
“Do you want my chemistry final from last year or not?” Raichi asks once the footsteps recede.
To his credit, Kurona thinks about it for a solid minute before turning on the cast saw. “Okay.”
Raichi shows up to practice the next day without a doctor’s sign off, but luckily Coach Ego isn’t the type to care about administrative procedure. He grabs Raichi’s bare wrist, turns it this way and then that and declares him fit to take the field.
He shoots Kiyora a shit-eating grin as he jogs past his place on the bench. Kiyora gives him the finger.
They win the next game against Tsukuba and Raichi won’t say it’s entirely due to the fact that he practically planted himself in their striker’s ass for the full ninety minutes but he certainly won’t say it isn’t either.
Life goes on. He plays football. He third wheels Kunigami and Chigiri dates that they swear up and down aren’t dates. He gets stupid drunk with Igarashi. He teaches Kurona new and interesting swear words. He doesn’t think about the sandwich or the bear.
That is until the worst happens.
He fails his philosophy midterm and no matter how much he begs and grovels and implies the possibility of a not insubstantial bribe, Professor Noa won’t give him extra credit.
Because Raichi isn’t a blubbering idiot, his plan A isn’t trying to summon a magic bear. No, plan A was bribery and that went down like a flaming house which means there is only one course of action left to him.
He’s too embarrassed to do this in his own kitchen so he ends up at Kiyora’s clubhouse because he knows Kiyora will judge him no matter what he does, so he might as well spend an entire Saturday afternoon building sandwich after sandwich with a dozen variations of fillings and condiments, one after another, never stopping even once. Luckily, there are enough hungry circle bros who are varying degrees of stoned milling about to eat up all his failed creations, so he only feels a little bit insane by the time he’s down to his last two slices of bread.
Kiyora appears around the same time to set up his laptop on the kitchen bar.
“If you’re done having your mental breakdown,” Kiyora says, blocky headphones poised over his ears, “I wouldn’t mind a grilled cheese.”
Raichi opens his mouth to say something, but Kiyora just lets go of the cups, two-inch thick cushions descending on his ears to cover up the devastatingly witty comeback Raichi has yet to prepare, and stares back placidly at Raichi’s glare. And because he let Raichi take over his kitchen for two hours, no questions asked, Raichi shuts up and makes him a grilled cheese.
Only afterwards as he’s walking home does Raichi realize that he never actually ate anything himself and the only thing he actually wants is, go figure, a sandwich. But not just any sandwich.
It’s about a ten minute walk from Circle Row to the downtown of the little town that sprung up next to campus. The prime shopping area is really only one road, but it’s crammed with a dozen different restaurants. The one that serves the katsu sando he’s looking for is nestled between a bookshop and a cafe. He likes it here because it’s not too expensive and the way they cut their bread reminds him of the way that his mom used to when he was a kid, not that he’d ever admit that. The only difference is that they always skimp on the sauce, so he asks for extra on the side. He sets himself up at one of the red plastic tables on the sidewalk, hidden away under an umbrella to eat himself a late lunch. As he pours the last drop of spicy mayo onto his chicken, a burst of smoke erupts to his left.
Raichi should feel surprised or maybe freaked the fuck out, but instead, he’s a little giddy at the appearance of... well... not the bear.
Wide, doleful eyes stare at him from a face that is very much human. If not for the silver-black hair swept up in an intricate knot twined with ivy and the simple homespun yukata, Raichi would think he was an ill-timed interloper.
“Hello,” the guy says.
“Hey.” Raichi puts down the piece of bread still held in his right hand and holds up his arm. “Uh, thanks for this.”
A small smile appears on the guy’s lips. “And thank you for the sandwich. It was very good.”
“So,” Raichi says, still trying to wrap his head around the fact that it actually worked and reality wasn’t as understandable as it was yesterday. “So you are the magic talking bear? Or I guess magic talking dude. Or just magic dude since, you know, most dudes talk.”
The smile disappears into confusion. “I’m not a bear or a dude. I’m Gagamaru, a forest spirit.”
“Oh, right,” Raichi says, like that clears anything up. “I’m Raichi.”
“Raichi,” the dud- forest spirit says. “You summoned me again.”
“Yes!” Raichi suddenly remembers why he was going through all this sandwich nonsense in the first place. “A sandwich for a miracle, right? Here, how about this one?”
The forest spirit pokes at the fried chicken for a moment, humming a little before saying, “No, I don’t like this one.”
“What the fu-” Raichi starts before shutting up to remind himself: magic talking forest spirit who is going to save his ass from Noa’s sadistic grading rubric. He takes a deep breath. “Come on, it’s a really good sandwich! Much better than the one I made.”
The forest spirit scrunches up his nose and it’s kind of, well, cute, not that this is the best time to be noticing that. “It has flesh on it.”
Raichi’s jaw drops to the floor. Goddamned Chigiri and his disgusting environmentally friendly heart healthy protein was the reason he managed to quick-heal his wrist? There was no way in hell Raichi was ever letting him find out that little tidbit.
There was a more pressing matter at hand. “Right, right,” Raichi mutters, taking back his sandwich and looking around at the shops surrounding them. There was a salad place across the courtyard, but Raichi wasn’t going to try and barter with a bowl of lettuce. Maybe the Chinese place had vegetarian options? Or they could go for sushi. Fish wasn’t really meat. “So what do you want to eat?”
Gagamaru looks around as well. “Oh,” he says, eyes widening slightly as they land on something of interest. Raichi follows his gaze to the cafe next door. His heart drops as he realizes what exactly caught the spirit’s eye. A colorful (read: bright pink) advertisement posted by the door has a variety of cakes and drinks and desserts all themed around Hello Kitty.
“That’s for little kids,” Raichi protests weakly.
“There’s a grown human sitting in the window,” the spirit points out, and sure enough, there is an adult man seated at one of the tables.
“Yeah, but he’s with his daughter! We can’t go in there!”
“They won’t give us any?” the spirit asks, turning his gaze back towards Raichi. Anyone else and it would sound sarcastic, but the look on the spirit’s face is so open that Raichi can’t bring himself to lie.
“I mean, yeah, they’d serve us, but it’d be fucking weird!”
The spirit nods a little and, to Raichi’s relief, starts looking around the plaza again. The relief doesn’t last long though, because not even a minute later, the spirit is looking at the cafe again. “That’s what I want.”
Raichi is used to screaming on the outside, but screaming on the inside is also a good healthy way to deal with frustration. He allows himself this for a solid ten seconds before pulling up his big boy pants. His masculinity is so secure he could hang kettlebells from it, even the ones that Kunigami uses that make cantaloupes look small. It’ll be worth it.
“Fine. Let’s do this.” Raichi grabs his sandwich in one hand and his backpack in the other. Let no one say that Raichi Jingo was defeated by a Hello Kitty cafe collab.
A little bell jingles as he marches through the door and plants himself in front of the hostess stand. “A table for two, please!” he announces, glaring as if daring her to say anything.
She doesn’t. Instead, she just smiles and invites them to follow her to an empty table against the wall. Raichi thanks her silently every step of the way for not putting them near the window, though that might be just so they don’t scare away potential customers.
The table is pink. The seats are pink. The menus are pink. The only thing that isn’t pink is the massive white neon outline of a cat’s head that takes up one entire wall. He shoots a photo of it and texts it to Chigiri.
Wedding venue idea
I’m demoting you to flower girl
So you admit you are dating someone
Shut
“What’s that?” Gagamaru asks, peering curiously over the table at Raichi’s phone.
“Uh - a phone.”
“I know that,” Gagamaru says.
“The fuck? You didn’t know what a sandwich was but you know what a phone is?” Raichi argues.
“I know what a sandwich is,” Gagamaru replies, unfazed. “It’s hard to see with the bear-suit on. I want to know what that is.”
He points again at Raichi’s phone, but this time, it’s obvious that he’s talking about the sticker on the case.
“That’s Caiman! He’s the main character in my favorite manga.” Raichi would usually love spending a few hours explaining the plot of Dorohedoro to an inductee, but he wants to get out of this place as soon as possible, so he shoves his phone quickly into his pocket. “Do you know what you want to order?”
If Gagamaru is offended by Raichi’s attitude, he doesn’t show it. His expression is placid as ever as he looks down at the menu laid out in front of him. “One of everything, please.”
Raichi pales. There aren’t that many items, eight desserts and six drinks, but they’re probably at least 1000 calories each and loaded with enough sugar to kill a horse.
“You’re going to die, man,” Raichi says.
“I don’t think so.”
And who is Raichi to argue what will kill a forest spirit with a forest spirit. He places the order and doesn’t get anything for himself because a) he’s not eight years old and b) he’s pretty sure Gagamaru isn’t going to be able to finish and Raichi can graciously offer to take the strawberry kiwi cream cake off his hands. The staff really exhibits peak professionalism because the waitress just smiles and bows instead of recoiling in horror when he tells her he wants one of everything.
“So,” Raichi says, as they wait, “what’s with the bear-suit?”
“I was raised by a she-bear,” Gagamaru says with a little smile. “When she died, I skinned her and made her pelt into a suit.”
Raichi swallows hard. All the alarm bells that had told him to run away as fast as he could the first time they met are back and going off with lights and sirens. Why the fuck did he think it was a good idea to mess with this shit again ? He was lucky to get away with a good deal the first time around but he really should have known better than to test fate again.
“Sorry,” Gagamaru says after a moment, ducking his head. “That was a bad joke. It’s been a while since I’ve talked to humans.” He looks back up again and says with utter sincerity, “Bear fur is warm and it’s cold at night. I’m not related to the bear that died.”
Raichi isn’t sure if he’s relieved or furious. Actually, he’s both, because if nothing else, Raichi can always manage to be furious.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” he shouts. “In what universe is that funny?”
“Ants have a very morbid sense of humor,” Gagamaru replies and Raichi can’t tell if this is another joke or not.
Luckily, the food arrives before Raichi can make that decision and he’s instead treated to a whole new spectacle. Gagamaru eats like an animal. This works well enough for the fruit tart which can be devoured while being held by the crust in one hand, the pudding is another story.
“Utensils!” Raichi screeches. “Use a spoon!” He holds up the offending tool and shakes it in front of Gagamaru’s face.
“To do what?” Gagamaru asks, genuinely perplexed.
“What do you mean?” Raichi doesn’t really know where to go from there. “To eat!”
Gagamaru just shrugs. “Don’t need it.” And then proceeds to shove his tongue into the glass dish and in a few skillful swipes, empties out its contents.
Raichi is stunned into silence. It’s disgusting. It’s animalistic. It’s weirdly erotic. Raichi can’t ignore his discomfort as he watches Gagamaru methodically demolish the entire table full of desserts with nothing more than his bare hands and mouth, and he can’t help but wonder what else those fingers and tongue are capable of.
He doesn’t even remember to be disappointed when the last bite of cake pops into Gagamaru’s mouth, washed down with the final sip of lemon soda. He’s still staring at his red, red lips as that tongue appears once last time to lick away a few lingering crumbs.
Only when Gagamaru asks “So what did you want in return?” does Raichi remember the matter at hand.
“Oh, um,” Raichi says, clearing his head of unholy thoughts. “I need you to fix this.”
He holds up his phone to show him the email with his failing midterm grade displayed in stark black numbers.
Gagamaru stares at the screen for a moment before looking Raichi in the face. “I don’t know how to fix that.”
Raichi gapes. His worry had always been whether he’d be able to summon the being that healed his wrist (and if he could be certified insane for even trying), never once considering if what he wanted was within his powers. He’d just assumed that a magic talking bear would have limits .
“Make the number higher!” Raichi tries.
“Okay,” Gagamaru nods. “How do I do that?”
“You just,” Raichi flounders. Actually he has no idea either. He knows abstractly that there’s a server somewhere that has his philosophy grades saved in its... memory banks? Harddrives? Fuck, he’s a sports education major, not a comp sci nerd.
Gagamaru is still staring at him like he might shit out a plausible answer, but Raichi’s got nothing. He frantically tries to pivot. What is it that Coach Ego is always telling them? When the situation is the hottest, the top players will find a solution anyways.
The first thought that comes to mind is to kill Professor Noa, but even Raichi is a little horrified at the idea and dismisses it quickly as an intrusive thought. He actually kind of respects the guy for not giving into the bribery attempt (or reporting him for it).
“I don’t know,” Raichi laments as no other ideas rise from the quagmire of his mind. “I basically need to get a perfect grade on the final paper now if I want to pass the class. You’re the wise and benevolent forest spirit. What’s your idea?”
Gagamaru blinks at him a few times and Raichi actually allows his hopes to rise a little bit. All the better, apparently, to let them fall and shatter when Gagamaru opens his mouth and utters one devastating word.
“Study.”
Raichi loses it.
It turns out, when a forest deity owes you a favor, they don’t leave you the fuck alone until they fulfill it. It’s not exactly a monkey paw situation (Raichi doesn’t have zombies knocking at his door... yet) but it does introduce new and exciting challenges. For example, finding him normal human clothes so he doesn’t stick out like such a sore thumb.
“Uh, hey,” Kunigami says, walking in on them.
That may not be the best way to put it, especially since Gagamaru is standing there naked save for a pair of Raichi’s boxers, but there is a sense of shame involved since they are in Kunigami’s room, rummaging through Kunigami’s closet.
The thing is, Raichi isn’t short, but Gagamaru is very, very tall. And Kunigami is not quite as tall, but he’s definitely taller than Raichi, ergo, his clothes might actually fit the lanky figure of a stray forest spirit.
If only his sense of fashion wasn’t butt ugly. Fuck, he used his outside voice didn’t he?
“You probably shouldn’t say that about someone you’re stealing clothes from,” Kunigami replies smoothly, crossing his arms across his chest in a way that makes his biceps bulge out threateningly. Not that Raichi’s intimidated. Raichi could take him in a fight. Or at least Gagamaru could magic him a win. Probably.
“We’re not stealing,” Gagamaru says, slipping the bright orange turtleneck Raichi just handed him over his head. “We’re borrowing.”
“Yeah,” Raichi chimes in. “That’s right, so no need to get your panties in a twist.”
“Uh huh,” Kunigami says, unimpressed. “And now that we’ve established the what, let’s move on to who and why.”
“This is Gagamaru,” Raichi cuts in quickly before the forest spirit can give away the game. “He’s in my philosophy class. He, uh, had an accident on the way over here. A flock of pigeons just, you know, shat all over him. It was a real mess, super unlucky.”
Kunigami recoils in a way that suggests he actually buys the story. “Please tell me you took a shower before you touched my clothes.”
“Yes!” Raichi interjects again once he sees the No forming on Gagamaru’s lips. “We’re not animals.”
He can feel more than see the disapproval radiating off Gagamaru.
“Just tell me where your pants are and we’ll be out of your hair.”
Kunigami just sighs and points to one of the plastic bins tucked into the bottom of the closet and Raichi grabs the first pair of jeans he comes across.
“Thanks man! I owe you one,” he says, dragging Gagamaru out into the hallway as fast as he can.
“Please just wash my clothes before returning them. And you better return them. I know where you sleep!” follows them across the hall into Raichi’s room.
Raichi laughs a little as he falls onto his bed, lifting his head a little to enjoy the sight of Gagamaru putting on the jeans. Despite his earlier dig, the outfit doesn’t look bad on the forest spirit. Or maybe he just wears it better than Kunigami ever could. He’s muscled, but in a lanky way that lets the fabric drape and fall rather than choke around excessive bulk.
“So,” Gagamarus says as he sits down on the edge of the bed. “What now?”
Raichi lets his head fall back to his pillow as he stares up at the cracked paint on his bedroom ceiling. He doesn’t really have a plan here. His spot on the football team is still in peril, and with it, a good portion of his scholarship, which means he might not even be able to come back next year to try and pass philosophy again. And what he thought was his ace in the sleeve for getting out of this corner has turned into just another thing to worry about. What the hell was he even doing dragging around a forest spirit? That had to be like, really bad for his karma or whatever. He never really believed in that spiritual hooha before, but he couldn’t really deny its existence now, could he? Damn it. He hadn’t really woken up this morning looking for a complete change in his world view.
The bed shifts under him as Gagamaru moves, and soon enough, there’s a warm body laid out next to him.
“I don’t mind,” Gagamaru says, “if you want to take some time to come up with a request. I’ve missed being in the human world.”
“Yeah?” Raichi asks, tilting his head a little to be able to look at Gagamaru’s face in profile. “When was the last time?”
Gagamaru is silent for a moment. “About three years ago, a little girl was able to summon me. She wanted me to bring her mother back, but I didn’t know how to do that either.”
“Shit, man,” Raichi curses, looking back up towards the ceiling. “That fucking sucks.”
“Her next request was for me to go away.”
For a moment, the notion is tempting, but Raichi feels a little guilty right afterwards. When he glances to the side, Gagamaru is staring at him again.
“Quit it, man,” Raichi growls. “I’m not going to wish for you to fuck off. This is a solid 24-karat golden opportunity here. I’m not wasting it like that.”
Gagamaru hums a little before turning away again.
“So what now?” he asks again.
No brilliant ideas have appeared in the meantime, so Raichi reverts back to what he always does. “I guess we just wing it.”
Forest spirits like to people-watch and, luckily, this one isn’t particular about where they do it. Gagamaru is perfectly happy tagging along with Raichi as he goes through his errands for the weekend. From his enthusiasm, you would think a trip to the grocery store was like going to Disneyland and the laundromat was a five-star resort. Even homework at the library turns into an opportunity for Gagamaru to closely inspect every interaction at the checkout counter.
There is one thing, though, that Raichi forbids Gagamaru from witnessing.
“Please,” Raichi begs on his knees.
“You said you didn’t need my help,” Chigiri says, hands on his hips.
“I was wrong! I’ve grown!”
“You said tutoring was for pussies.”
“I am a changed man!” Raichi wails.
Chigiri narrows his eyes. “So you’re actually going to take this seriously?”
“As a heart attack!”
“And this isn’t going to be a huge waste of my time?”
“Nothing would be more fruitful!”
Chigiri purses his lips and Raichi puts on his most pathetic, pitiable face.
“Twenty dollars an hour,” Chigiri says, “Wait no. All of my house chores for the rest of the semester.”
Raichi nearly sobs in relief. “Yes, thank you! So fucking much! You’re saving my ass, Chigs, I swear if Kunigami wouldn’t deck me I could kiss you right now.”
“Ew, don’t,” Chigiri says, wrinkling his nose. “And Kunigami wouldn’t care. We’re not dating.”
“Right, sure,” Raichi says, “Whatever you say.”
He backs out of the room the way he came and saunters down the hall to his own bedroom.
“Easy as pie,” he announces as he falls into his chair. Gagamaru looks up from where he’s halfway through a volume of Dorohedoro.
“I can help you with the chores.”
Raichi nearly falls out of his chair.
“You heard that?” he splutters.
Gagamaru looks back down and flips a page. “The walls are very thin.”
Raichi can’t help it, he cracks up. He’s learned a few things about Gagamaru in the last couple of days. He has an inordinate sweet tooth, finds everything at least a little bit fascinating, and has a sense of humor so dry you could grind it into powder and smoke it in a pipe. His powers are also very specific. He can make almost anything grow or wither, he can talk to animals, and he can turn into a tree. None of it is really all that useful unless you happen to have a broken wrist that needs healing.
His plan at this point is to just let Gagamaru enjoy a few days in the human world like he’s hosting a foreign exchange student and then wish for something stupid. Hell, if he’s feeling particularly charitable, he might even get him to fix up Rin or Shidou, depending on who’s annoying him less that day. In the meantime, it’s kind of fun to hang out with someone so chill who isn’t trying to one-up Raichi in some way or another.
It’s surprisingly easy to explain away a whole extra dude. To his classmates, he’s a potential transfer student auditing a few lectures. To his housemates, he’s an exile who needs a place to stay while a plumbing catastrophe gets repaired (which is also a convenient sob story to sucker Kunigami into parting with more of his clothes). To the rest of the team, he’s just Raichi’s friend who likes football.
That is until Kiyora gets his hands on the situation.
“So,” Kiyora starts, “since when did you have a boyfriend?”
“What the fuck?” Raichi splutters, choking up a mouthful of water that had come this close from going up his nose. “He’s not my boyfriend!”
“Sure,” Kiyora says, turning away like he’s a perfectly reasonable dude having a perfectly reasonable conversation when Raichi knows better. He’s a shit-stirrer of the shittiest variety.
“Ohhhhhh,” Shidou crows, sidling onto the bench next to them. “What’s this I hear? Is our resident Bakugo in luurrrvvv? Is it mister tall, dark and handsome over there? Do I hear wedding bells in the future?”
“Shut the fuck up, Shidou!” Raichi screeches, shoving him away from his face.
“Raichi and guy whose name I don’t know, sitting in a tree!” Shidou sings after him. “F-U-C-K-I-N-G!”
“What are you? Five?” Raichi shouts back, “Next time Rin tries to kill you I’m letting him!”
Shidou’s banshee laugh follows him towards the net where Kurona is waiting his turn in line for shooting practice. Raichi picks up a ball and slots himself behind him.
“So you’re not dating?” Kurona asks without turning around.
“Of course not!” Raichi growls. “Shit, does everyone think that?”
Kurona shrugs his little shoulders. “He’s been at practice every day for almost a week. If you aren’t already dating, I’d say at least one of you wants to be.”
“Shows how much you know,” Raichi snorts. “He just has nothing better to do.”
Kurona takes his turn against Fukaku, the goalkeeper easily deflecting his shot. Raichi goes next and his ball just barely glances off the top bar.
He stalks over to the other edge of the training field where no one likes to practice because the ground dips just enough to be constantly muddy to get away from the pack of kindergarteners that he has to put up with every day. If Gagamaru just happens to be there hanging out, it’s just a coincidence.
“You have interesting friends,” Gagamaru comments.
“They’re not my friends,” Raichi grumbles. “Do you see how they treat me?”
“About the same as you treat them,” Gagamaru says.
“Shut it!” Raichi pokes a finger into the middle of his chest. “You’re here to grant me wishes, not criticize my personality.”
“Of course not,” Gagamaru says. “I like your personality. You’re very honest about how you feel about things.”
Raichi doesn’t know what to say to that. That’s not the usual reaction his temper gets.
“Although,” Gagamaru continues, scratching the side of his face with one finger, “it must be stressful to always be so honest.”
“That sounded like a criticism, buddy,” Raichi says.
Gagamaru shrugs off his complaint. “I think I can help with that.”
“I’m not using up my request to be less angry !”
“No,” Gagamaru agrees. “I don’t think I need magic for this.”
A dozen possibilities cross Raichi’s mind as he lets Gagamaru lead him towards the edge of campus. A small part of him is still worried about being eaten. Another part of him is kind of hoping to be devoured. It’s neither of these things. Nor is it a magical cavern filled with food he cannot eat or a rabbit hole that leads to topsy turvy land or a rip in time and space that leads to a mirror universe where Raichi is a philosophy god who will trade places with him for a semester.
It’s just a clearing with a small brook that one might even say is babbling. Raichi swears there has to be at least a little magic, because despite the plummeting temperatures and the first frost, the trees here have yet to lose their leaves and the sun beams feel warm across his face.
Gagamaru leads the way to a fallen tree trunk covered with a thick layer of moss that almost feels soft to sit upon. From what Raichi’s heard about this whole nature schtick, there’s supposed to be weird noises that people mistake for cryptids and yokai - chirping birds and hooting owls and chittering insects - but he can’t pick any of that out. There’s only the sound of water trickling over stone. It’s not silence. It’s empty.
Raichi breathes in a chestful of late autumn air.
“What are we doing here?” he asks when it becomes clear that nothing interesting is going to happen.
“Shhh,” Gagamaru says, patting the back of Raichi’s hand where it rests against a patch of lichen that looks like crackling green paint. Raichi picks at it a little bit until his fingernail comes away with a crescent of dark, loamy soil.
He looks back up towards the trees in the direction from which they came. The campus with its beige sandstone buildings is completely invisible beyond the foliage. He knows that they aren’t that far from civilization, maybe a fifteen minute walk, but it feels like they’re in a whole different part of the world.
Gazing about, he’s hoping to find something interesting to look at - a weird mushroom, a cool fossil, a small animal going about its small life - but there’s nothing. He’s tempted to look at Gagamaru, to try and start a conversation, but he gets the feeling that’s not what he’s supposed to do.
He kind of hates it. He doesn’t like the stillness. He feels like he should be moving, doing something, fighting in one way or another for his place in the world. Everyone else has their shit together and he’s the one who just can’t figure it out. The only thing he’s ever been good at is football and even then he isn’t good enough . That’s probably why he’s always so pissed at Kiyora, who seems content to just sit on the sidelines. But Raichi has one thing over all of their heads and that is stamina . Raichi can hang on for the longest, he can stay the course, he can just keep going and going and going until he finds... something. What good is stamina if you’re just standing still?
“ARGH,” he shouts into the emptiness, and the trees swallow the sound. There’s no echo, no response, no scandalized citizenry deciding whether to call the cops.
“FUCK!” he shouts again, a little giddy, getting up to really let loose.
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” he lets out, louder than he’s ever allowed himself to be.
He laughs a little, before remembering he does still have an audience. This probably wasn’t what Gagamaru had in mind when he said this would help him feel calmer. The forest spirit is staring at him, mouth slightly open, maybe in surprise. Raichi squirms a little under his gaze, until Gagamaru opens his mouth and lets out a long, low bellow.
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.”
Raichi is fucking delighted. He lets his head fall back and he screams wordlessly into the air, reveling in the freedom. When he’s done, he feels lightheaded, but also light-bodied and light-spirited. He knows that this doesn’t change anything. All of his problems are still there, waiting for him just beyond the edge of the clearing, but all the pressure that’s been building up inside of him is temporarily released.
“Maybe nature isn’t so bad after all,” Raichi says, sitting back down on the dead tree.
“Nature is pretty awesome,” Gagamaru confirms, nodding.
“You ever do this when you’re by yourself out here?”
“No,” Gagamaru says. “It attracts the wolves.”
Raichi starts, looking around him frantically, until he notices the glimmer in the corner of Gagamaru’s eyes.
“Oh fuck you,” Raichi says, shoving Gagamaru’s shoulder.
“Hmmm,” Gagamaru says, lips tilting up, “that is one request I could fulfill.”
Raichi laughs, but on the way back to campus, he can’t help wondering if maybe that wasn’t a joke after all.
Whatever relief Raichi found out there in the woods, it only lasts about a day, because that’s when he gets the text from Kurona.
got fired
Raichi’s stomach sinks. He doesn’t even need to ask to know it was his fault. Kurona wasn’t the type to start shit. He was a hard worker, resourceful, and smarter than anyone ever gave him credit for. Sure, sometimes he had his funny habits, but nothing that someone could get fired over, which only left one possibility.
what happened
security footage. theft.
Raichi frowns at his phone screen. Theft? Okay, so Kurona may have borrowed a cast saw and used it without permission (or license), but he didn’t take anything. That cast saw went right back to the storeroom when they were done with it. Raichi hits the call button.
“Those asshats think you stole something?” Raichi growls into his phone as soon as Kurona picks up.
“Equipment counts were off, off. Syringes and tourniquets and stuff. I was the only one caught on camera going in and out of a storeroom unauthorized, and one of the times I had something clearly hidden under my scrubs. Looks bad, bad.”
Raichi’s hand clenches around his phone so tight he’s surprised he doesn’t crack the screen.
“Can’t you just tell them what really happened? Tell them it was my fault! I made you do it!”
Kurona makes a little sound into the phone that Raichi knows is him chattering his teeth. “Wouldn’t matter. Wouldn’t matter. I’d still be fired.”
“Fuck!”
Gagamaru gets up off the couch where he’s reading another volume of manga and sits down with Raichi at the dining table, chin resting on his folded arms.
“I’m going to figure out a way to fix this,” Raichi promises, even though he has no clue how he’s going to do that.
“Okay, okay,” Kurona says. “I hope so.”
“What’s going on?” Gagamaru asks as soon as he hangs up and Raichi explains the situation with a lot more cursing and insults than strictly necessary but this is an emergency here. Of all the people Raichi knows, Kurona is probably the only person who actually likes their part-time job, not to mention it being part of his actual degree.
“Is there anything you can do? Mind-wipe his boss or something?”
Gagamaru frowns. “I can’t do that.”
Raichi swears even though he kind of figured that wasn’t going to be possible.
“But,” Gagamaru continues, “I can find the real thief.”
Raichi kind of wants to kiss him.
It turns out that cameras aren’t the only things that are always watching. There’s all sorts of creatures hanging about no matter where you are, even inside a clinic that gets cleaned from floor to ceiling at least twice a day. Ants don’t just have a morbid sense of humor, they also have decent memories and are willing to part with that knowledge for the low, low payment of a Kitkat bar. The problem is that they are pretty small and don’t have that wide a range, which means tracking the culprit involves multiple ant colonies, half a bag of chocolates, and most of a day to find the right house, a massive three-story house directly across the street from where Raichi was furiously making sandwiches just last week.
They aren’t the only ones who find it. There’s probably fifty people crammed into the downstairs living area that Raichi can see from the door. The lights flash through so many colors so quickly that they’re probably using it to brainwash people into actually liking the eardrum-piercing aggro-drift-phonk that blasts from the speakers.
There’s two shirtless pledges in sunglasses stationed at the door practically shaking with how cold it is, but they still have the cojones to try and stop them from getting inside. One of them shouts something that Raichi can’t understand, so he ignores it and tries to push past him, but the compulsion to be chosen as a rarified circle bro must give the scrawny kid superhuman strength because he actually manages to wrestle Raichi away from the door.
Raichi’s pretty sure he could take him in a fight if it actually came to it, but he’s not here to have a good time.
And that’s when a most unlikely savior emerges from the milieu of gin-soaked bodies. Kiyora taps one of the kids on the shoulder and says something in his ear and suddenly Raichi and Gagamaru are allowed inside. It only takes another ten minutes or so to confirm where the syringes went. They slip outside again as soon as they can, stopping only to give Kiyora a heads up to haul ass out of there.
They let the cops take it from there.
“I can’t believe you’re a snitch,” Kiyora says, sitting next to Raichi on the porch of his clubhouse, watching the police drag a couple kids into the back of their car.
“Fuck that!” Raichi snarls. “I don’t give a shit what you do to your own fucking body, but I’m not letting my friend take the fall when you jack your methhead paraphernalia from the student clinic.”
“Hold on,” Kiyora says. “Those are the fuckers that got Kurona fired?”
“Why the hell else would I report them?”
“Huh,” Kiyora says, “how did you figure that out?”
“It wasn’t me,” Raichi admits. “It was all him. I really owe you one, Gagamaru! We’re going to celebrate tonight, anything you want, even if it’s getting diabetes from Hello Kitty.”
Raichi looks over his shoulder, expecting to catch the gaze of those big, dark eyes, only to find himself looking at an empty porch swing.
“Gagamaru?” He turns his head, searching the entire front of the house, and when he doesn’t see him, gets up to circle the yard, peering into the darkness for the tall, lanky shape of the forest spirit.
Only after a second lap that takes him halfway down the street in either direction does the truth of the matter settle over him. Gagamaru is gone. Raichi had finally made his request, and now that it had been fulfilled, the forest spirit had disappeared back to wherever he came from. Raichi was so stupid. He hadn’t even bothered to ask where Gagamaru was from or the exact condiment design that would summon him back again. He’d gotten lucky twice now. What were the chances of a third time?
“What are you doing?” Kiyora asks from his perch.
“Going home to make a sandwich,” Raichi answers with no further explanation. And then, for some reason obscure to even himself, he adds, “You should drop by. I’ll make you a grilled cheese.”
The next month goes by in a blur and the end of the semester appears in front of him like a shark fin in deep water. Basically, Raichi is fucked.
“Tell me it isn’t that bad,” Raichi says, head in his hands.
“Raichi.”
“Tell me I can fix it.”
“Raichi.”
“Or at least make a nice speech at my funeral.”
“Raichi!” Chigiri actually starts laughing , which finally gets Raichi to look up.
“This?” Chigiri holds up his laptop and taps on the screen. “This is actually good .”
“Wait, really?” Raichi can’t believe it.
“I didn’t realize you were so interested in theism, I could have lent you some books,” Chigiri says. “What you say about the importance of ritual in modern day-to-day life as a substitute for traditional kami worship and spiritual belief is actually kind of fascinating. How did you come up with that?”
There’s no way Raichi can tell him the truth, that the sandwiches which numbered in the hundreds that first night before petering out to a single serving per day due to budgetary limits had become a sort of comfort to him. It might not work out this time, but he could always get it right tomorrow.
“What?” he says instead, “I told you I was going to take this seriously.”
Chigiri looks at him skeptically, but only for a moment before he slaps him on the shoulder and heads down the hall towards his bedroom.
“Kunigami and I are going to head downtown to check out this new collab they’ve got going on at the cafe. You in?”
Raichi needs another hour witnessing Chigiri and Kunigami each fail to realize how big a crush the other has on them like he needs another hole in the head.
“Hard pass.”
“Your loss,” Chigiri sings out as the door closes behind him.
Besides, Raichi already has dinner plans. He slides out of his chair and heads into the kitchen to make his sandwich for the day. He’s about to pull the bread out of the fridge when there’s a knock at the door.
Raichi figures it’s someone Chigiri or Kunigami is expecting, so he yells out, “Who’s there?”
“Me,” comes the muffled voice, and Raichi can feel his heart stutter. There’s no fucking way.
He rushes towards the door and yanks it open and sure enough, one oversized forest spirit stands in front of him. Raichi pinches his arm to make sure he’s real.
“Don’t do that,” Gagamaru says with a frown.
“How are you here?” Raichi asks, stunned. “I mean, I didn’t even start making the sandwich!”
“Oh,” Gagamaru says, picking an errant leaf out of his bangs. “I walked.”
“You - what do you mean you walked? From where?”
“Mt. Shirakami.”
Geography is not Raichi’s strongest subject, but even he knows that it's nearly on the opposite end of Honshu. “Holy shit. Have you been walking this entire time?”
“No,” Gagamaru says. “I stopped to sleep.”
Raichi laughs. All this time, he’d been trying to recreate some intricate sigil when the solution had been so simple it feels stupid.
“Well, get in here!” He slings an arm around Gagamaru’s shoulders, tough to do when forest spirits are only built in size extra large, but it’s worth it to feel the solid heft of someone he almost doesn’t quite believe is actually real.
Raichi drags him into the living room and stands back, hands still holding onto his arms as he looks him up and down. Somewhere between here and Mt. Shirakami, Gagamaru had ditched Kunigami’s fashion disasters in favor of a linen shirt and drawstring pants that look like they were hand-stitched. They probably were. The clothes are butt-ugly and covered in grime, but Raichi can’t help but think that Gagamaru still looks good in them. Hell, all he wants to do is look at Gagamaru’s face, to stare into those soul-searching eyes that seem to hold a tantalizing mix of good humor, unfathomable wisdom, a glint of mischief, and endless fascination.
“I’m hungry,” Gagamaru says.
Raichi grins. “I’ve got just the thing.”
Raichi is a sensible man. He doesn’t believe in magical talking bears. He does believe in miracles.
It's hard not to when a living, breathing spirit sits across from you at the breakfast table every morning refusing to let you steal a piece of their hash brown even though you're the one who made it for them. Gagamaru doesn't owe Raichi anything, not anymore. This means there's no more quick fixes for minor injuries or knowing what the cockroach that skittered across the floor thinks of Raichi's poor attempts at killing it with a shoe, at least not until Raichi figures out how exactly he's supposed to draw that damn sigil. He still tries occasionally, when presented with the chance. Kiyora likes ketchup on his grilled cheeses, which Raichi feels like is reason enough to keep him benched. It's not an every day thing, though, which probably saves him a ton in bread costs alone.
Gagamaru could fuck off if he wants to, which is why when Raichi kisses him for the first time after he gets his final (passing) grade in for Intro to Philosophy, he knows it's by choice that Gagamaru lifts him off the ground and slips him some tongue.
No, Gagamaru is pretty much a normal dude nowadays. The miracle is that he sticks around anyways.