Chapter Text
When Yamaguchi Tadashi finds himself in a less-than-ideal situation, he retraces the moments throughout his day that could have compounded together to cause his current predicament. It’s how he copes.
In today's example, maybe if he didn’t spend those extra five minutes wasting away in bed that morning, he wouldn’t have missed his train to work, thereby causing him to stay just a tad later than usual, which, in turn, resulted in Nishinoya returning home to their apartment first and attempting to use the kitchen entirely unchaperoned.
A recipe for disaster. And disaster did indeed strike—in the form of a pepperoni hot pocket, charred beyond human consumption.
Dejected, it sits between the two of them on the kitchen island. The smoke detector’s wails drown out Nishinoya’s somewhat-sincere apologies. Tadashi chokes on the thick smoke as his diminutive yet destructive roommate fans his arms towards the cracked, backyard-facing window.
“I-I just used the pizza setting, I swear!” Nishinoya insists, gesturing towards the microwave.
Tadashi blinks at him, eyes stinging from the smoke. It has a bite to it that’s alarmingly pepperoni-flavoured.
“I think that setting is meant for a whole pizza, not a single pocket,” he rationalizes.
Nishinoya tosses his hands in the air. “Well, that wasn’t an option!” he exclaims, aghast at the suggestion.
Tadashi bites down on his tongue. Nishinoya climbs atop the counter and cranks the window open, attempting to clear the smoke that has begun to cling to the kitchen cabinets. Late-summer heat surges in, disrupting the careful temperature balance Tadashi has achieved with meticulous fan placement and a strict windows closed during the day policy.
He groans, raking a sweaty palm down his even sweatier face.
It’s not that living with Nishinoya doesn’t have its perks. For instance: a bored, under-stimulated, thirteen-year old Nishinoya had taught himself to pick locks one summer, so Tadashi’s uncanny ability to periodically misplace both their sets of house keys (his first, then Nishinoya’s when he all-too-trustingly lends them to Tadashi) is a non-issue.
Nishinoya pretty much never sleeps in his room. He passes out on the living room couch at three a.m., snoring in front of the television. The soft blue glow that invades down the hallway and into Tadashi’s first-floor bedroom is comforting, not dissimilar to when he was a child, and his mother would return home from a shift in the early hours of morning and flick the stove light on.
Tadashi never feels alone living with Nishinoya. He wishes he could say the same for their third roommate, who seems to have moulded his entire schedule around dodging him. It’s as petty as it is impressive, but Tadashi can’t really blame him. Nishinoya is an acquired taste, and Tadashi has been force-fed since his freshman year when Nishinoya responded to his ad on Craigslist, arriving at his doorstep with nothing but an overstuffed backpack and a beaten-up volleyball under his arm.
As if to prove his point, Nishinoya’s elbow knocks an errant glass off the countertop. It explodes on the tacky green tiling, shards sliding outwards towards Tadashi’s socked feet.
“Mazel tov !” Nishinoya shouts, far too gleeful for the mess he’s created, just as the doorbell rings. It’s Kinoshita’s turn to lose his keys, apparently.
“Don’t cut yourself,” Tadashi instructs, pointing a serious finger at Nishinoya as he side-steps fragments of broken glass. Nishinoya simply salutes in response.
Except, when Tadashi answers the door he’s not met with mousy hair and a wobbly smile, but a chest. A rather wide chest. This is strange, because for someone standing at Tadashi’s gangly height, he’s more accustomed to viewing the tops of people’s heads than anything else.
He tips his chin up. The owner of the chest is tall, stupidly so, with a pair of horn-rimmed glasses and a bored expression on his face. Bored is an understatement, though. It appears the man, standing at his doorstep for reasons unknown, has never experienced a moment of excitement in his entire life.
He’s also probably the most beautiful person Tadashi has ever seen—all short blond curls, deep-set honey eyes, and unmarred, pale skin.
“Guh-uh,” Tadashi says, then promptly wishes to die. It sounds like the ungodly hybrid of a burp and a gasp. He wonders if the height between Nishinoya’s unused bedroom window and their asphalt driveway would be sufficient to finish him off.
Tall Guy just stares down at him. Cicadas drone in the humid evening air, a fitting soundtrack to his apparent ennui.
“Fourteen ninety-five,” Tall Guy replies flatly. So, he does speak. Or perhaps he just calculates—what exactly, though, Tadashi is unsure of. It’s hard to tell when his face is giving decidedly nothing away.
“What?” Tadashi replies stupidly.
Tall Guy drops the orange messenger bag Tadashi had just noticed he was holding in his hand onto the concrete porch. It produces a defeated whump as it lands. He drags long, slender fingers through his hair and mutters, “Oh my god,” under his breath, as if he really is not being paid enough to be put through this sort of cruel and unusual torture.
A few things come into focus at once: the white name tag on the black polo stretched across Tall Guy’s chest, the idling putters of a vehicle with a gaudy pizza-shaped ornament perched on its roof, the sharp scent of warm pepperoni.
“Oh! You’re a pizza delivery guy!” Tadashi realizes aloud.
“Unfortunately,” Tall Pizza Guy drones.
“Haha! Sorry, it’s been a day—I missed my train to work and that was a disaster because it’s Thursday , which, you know, is the day I have to change out the water cooler, and I dropped it—again—so that ate like a whole half-hour of my time, then my roommate nearly set the house on fire by over-microwaving a hot pocket and—”
Tadashi stops himself, eyes flickering over the impassive expression on Tall Pizza Guy’s unfortunately attractive face.
“Yeah, you don’t care, um,” Tadashi mutters, cheeks flaming under the thin sheen of sweat that persists from July to September of each year.
He squints at his name tag. “Tsukki,” he decides. This is not what the name tag reads but he is sweaty and embarrassed and would like to overeat while watching an objectively bad horror movie with Nishinoya as soon as possible.
This misspeak, at least, drags a reaction out of him.
Tsukki lofts a single blond brow, opens the flat line of his lips as if he’s about to comment something Tadashi suspects will be quite clever, then doesn’t.
“Fourteen ninety-five,” he repeats.
“Right,” Tadashi concedes, thoroughly ready for this interaction to come to an end. He fumbles around within the cluttered confines of his work satchel he has not yet had a chance to put down, then hands Tsukki exact change, because he may be blushing furiously but he is not a pushover.
Tsukki’s left eye twitches as he accepts the cash. Tadashi basks in the tiny victory.
The pizza box is uncomfortably warm on his palms, already red and blotchy from the sticky-hot summer air. Yet Tadashi remains rooted in the doorway, transfixed by the sway of Tsukki’s broad back as he strides down the driveway and towards the delivery car.
Pale fingers wrap around the driver’s side door handle but he halts before yanking it open. He stares blankly at the interior of the car for a moment, then twists to face Tadashi, an impressive pout pulling down the corners of his mouth.
“Can you read?” Tsukki implores. He doesn’t raise his voice, and Tadashi finds himself leaning forwards to catch his words, then curses himself for doing so.
“Excuse me?”
He taps the rectangular piece of plastic on his chest with an impatient finger. “My name tag. It says Tsukishima. It’s really not that hard to pronounce.”
Tadashi gawks. Tsukki—Tsukishima’s pointed stare pierces him, clearing the slate of his mind. Any witty remark dissolves on his tongue, so he shouts the first thing that pops into his head.
“Oh, sorry, Tsukki!”
Tsukishima’s marble features crack and for an imperceivable second, his lips curling into a small grin that Tadashi can only describe as amused , before flattening to a cool line. Huffing, he ducks so deeply to fit through the car door that Tadashi can’t help but adopt an amused grin of his own.
—
“And then he was all, ‘can you read?’ with the smuggest look I’ve ever seen on a man’s face—and that’s saying something—like—like he was so proud of himself for coming up with that, y’know?” Tadashi rambles, waving a droopy slice of pizza around as he speaks.
A pepperoni slides off the gooey cheese and careens towards the already-stained living room carpet. Nishinoya snatches it midair, then pops it into his mouth triumphantly.
“Pff, jerkwad,” he mumbles, mouth full.
The fan strategically placed in the corner of the room whirs back and forth, back and forth, its monotonous drone doing little to cool the space even with all the lights off and the curtains drawn. On the television screen, the protagonist barricades herself in a coat closet, a kitchen knife clutched to her chest.
Tadashi shrugs. Inexplicably, he doesn’t want to agree wholeheartedly just yet. He rubs the back of his muggy neck.
“Well, I’m sure he takes his fair share of crap with that job.”
Nishinoya scoffs. “You’re too nice, my dude! So what'd he look like? Y’know, so I can teach him a lesson or two,” he lilts, punching his palm repeatedly with his fist.
With Nishinoya’s affinity for culinary pyrotechnics, Tadashi muses that a situation wherein he encounters the equal-parts-rude-and-handsome pizza guy again is quite likely.
His stomach swoops. He swallows a lump of cheese and dough that suddenly feels more like a wad of wet cement. More sweat beads on the back of his neck.
“Um, I don’t know, just like, a regular pizza guy?”
Nishinoya hops up onto his knees. The couch cushions sink in under his not insignificant weight, despite his modest height. Nishinoya sometimes reminds Tadashi of a pitbull—solid, intelligent, often misunderstood but typically harmless.
“C’mon, man, I need more than that! Any funky features? Nose ring? Face tattoo?”
Tadashi chuckles at the thought of Pizza Guy Tsukishima adorning either of those. He does not seem the type.
“Um, okay. He was tall—weirdly so. Y’know when you see someone unusually tall at, like, the grocery store or something, and think, woah, that’s a tall person! Yeah. And very blond, and he had these piercing eyes, nearly golden, and…” he trails off, feeling Nishinoya’s knowing gaze press against his side. He turns to face him.
“What?”
“So he was hot. And your type.”
“I didn’t say either of those things.”
Nishinoya’s grin is positively shit-eating.
“What?” Tadashi begs, jostling Nishinoya’s calf with his foot.
“Pizza Thursdays?” he croons, waggling his eyebrows like the absolute menace of a person he is. Tadashi wonders if the space-time continuum would be disrupted if Nishinoya didn’t consistently go out of his way to make his life more difficult than it already is. Perhaps some things just must be.
“God, please don’t,” he tries anyway.
“Too late! Plan’s already in motion,” Nishinoya sing-songs, undulating the impressively flexible joints in his fingers.
A cinematic crash explodes from the television as the killer splinters through the closet door with an axe that looks suspiciously plastic, immediately followed by a shrill squeak from the doorway that attaches the hallway to their living room.
Like a small woodland creature, their third roommate prefers their company at a comfortable distance. In response to any noise too loud or eye contact too direct, he skedaddles. It’s fucking weird, to be frank.
“Hisashi, wait! Come back! I love you!” Nishinoya hollers, flinging the flimsy plastic table that comes free inside the pizza box through the doorway, after him. It clatters noisily on the hardwood, widely missing the socked feet pattering frantically down the hall.
“That’s not how you make friends, Nishinoya,” Tadashi chastises.
“Sure it is,” he insists. "Worked so far!" he adds, a huffed afterthought.
The slamming of the basement door dictates otherwise.
—
Nishinoya Yuu is many things, but a liar, he is not.
True to his word, every Thursday evening he orders a large pepperoni pizza in the hopes of catching Hot Pizza Guy Tsukishima’s shift. Or, Tsukki, for short, which Tadashi finds easier to roll off the tongue despite Tsukishima’s protest. Not that Tadashi has been thinking about his bratty pout or self-effacing grin for the past couple weeks—that’d be borderline pathetic. Pathetic and creepy.
The day Nishinoya’s efforts succeed also happens to be the day Tadashi finds himself hanging, nothing but air beneath his feet, from the second-floor window.
His bare toes scrabble for purchase on the red brick of the house, arms straining from the effort of holding his own body weight up, and he regrets his heightened pizza consumption and long-forgotten gym membership more than ever before.
Today, the weather could accurately be described as hot-as-balls, so that’s not helping either. Sweat slips down the sides of his face. His arms tremble and buckle under his weight. Tires crunch on asphalt as what he can only assume to be a pizza delivery vehicle meanders up the driveway.
“Hey! Um, over here! A little help!” he hollers.
Shame has left the vicinity. He can temporarily tuck away his pride if it means coming out of this in one intact piece.
A car door slams. Tadashi’s biceps quiver. He wonders who will give a speech at his funeral, and how to signal to this Thursday's pizza delivery person that Nishinoya should be banned from doing so.
“Woah. Are you okay?”
Tadashi’s heart leaps into his throat. He’d recognize that uninterested drawl anywhere. It sort of pisses him off.
“Do I look okay?” he gasps, thinking himself ridiculous for feeling embarrassed about the angle Tsukishima must be getting on his ass in this somewhat literal life-or-death situation.
There’s some shuffling of sneakered feet; a dropping of a bag.
“Nah, not really.”
“Just—pick up the fucking ladder —” Tadashi shouts, exasperated, but is cut short by a spasming bicep, and the window frame is ripped from his sweaty grasp as gravity gets the better of him. Warm air rushes in his ears as he careens towards the asphalt driveway with not a thought in his mind except: fuck .
When his eyes snap open, he's met with a single, jarring truth: Tsukishima’s eyes have a faint ring of olive green orbiting their gold.
Tadashi now knows this, because he went from falling to what very well may have been his demise, or at least a sprained ankle, to being held upright by a pair of arms much thicker and wider than any pizza guy's have any business being, inches from said pizza guy's face.
This close, he can see that Tsukishima’s skin is not as flawless as he’d imagined in his self-indulgent daydreams over the past few weeks. His cheeks are flushed and ruddy from what Tadashi assumes must be the heat; there’s some acne scarring around his mouth (nothing to the extent of Tadashi’s own, but still a welcome sight), and his chin is spattered with fine blonde stubble.
Before Tadashi’s sentient limb has a chance to reach up and graze his knuckles over it, Tsukishima sets him down with a level of grace somewhat surprising for a man of his size.
The concrete is hot on his bare feet but Tadashi’s neck is hotter.
“My hero,” he grumbles, pressing a palm to the back of his feverish neck, unable to meet Tsukishima’s pointed stare.
“Yeah, well, thought maybe this time you’d tip me,” Tsukishima snarks.
Tadashi’s eyes snap up. Warm gold bores into him. He sputters, then composes himself. “Only in it for the reward, huh.”
“Precisely.”
“Unbelievable.”
They grin at each other for a beat too long, Tadashi’s chin tipped up to do so, Tsukishima’s eyes downcast through fine blond lashes, his lips forming less of a grin and more of a closed, reluctant upturn, but Tadashi decides it counts.
Tsukishima breaks eye contact first. He clears his throat, then primly brushes off his black jeans, which are entirely spotless. Then, he gestures towards the window that just attempted to end Tadashi’s short existence. “Should I assume your roommate was also to blame for that, uh, situation ,” he prods, lips forming that tiny, coy grin again.
“Hah, actually, not this time,” Tadashi explains, waving his hands nonspecifically around his head. “I was sort of taking measurements for a window AC unit." He pauses. Swallows. Then, "I'm getting pretty tired of waking up in a pool of my own sweat.”
Tsukishima wrinkles his nose. “Gross.”
“Yeah, it is pretty gross,” Tadashi giggles despite himself. Usually, his tendency to overshare makes him want to kick his own shins in, but he can’t manage to give a damn right now. He’s giddy. Giddy . The heat must finally be getting to him. The sleek black baseball cap pulling Tsukishima’s curls off his forehead might have something to do with it, too.
“I’m Yamaguchi, by the way.” He swipes his sweaty palm against his loose basketball shorts, then thrusts out his hand. “Yamaguchi Tadashi.”
Tsukishima takes his hand reluctantly, awkwardly, as if the embarrassing part of this encounter is the goddamn handshake . His hand is large, calloused, and dwarfs Tadashi’s. Tadashi tries not to dwell on this.
“Tsukishima Kei,” he says. “Since it bears repeating.”
The corners of Tadashi’s lips lift without his input—a knee-jerk reaction to Tsukishima’s wit, or maybe the cool, smooth palm still encasing his own. Warm bubbles rise in his chest and gather at the base of his throat.
“Sorry, guess you just look like a 'Tsukki' to me,” he banters, unable to help himself.
Tsukishima narrows his eyes. “What does a ‘Tsukki’ look like?”
“I dunno.” Tadashi shrugs. “Just you.” He prays Tsukishima doesn't implore further. He'd have nothing else to add.
At this, Tsukishima tilts his head to the side and regards Tadashi with what he can only describe as an adorable combination of confusion and intrigue. Then, he drops his hold on Tadashi’s hand and shoves his own into his jeans pockets. Only up to the knuckles though, because his jeans are tight and his hands are large.
“So, you guys really like pizza, huh.”
Tadashi cringes. Nishinoya will pay for this.
“Oh, well, I’m not like, pizza’s biggest fan or anything, it’s just, y’know…” he trails off, mortified. Pizza’s biggest fan? What the fuck, Tadashi?
“That roommate of yours?” Tsukishima asks, flashing a toothy grin, and Tadashi stifles the urge to press a palm to the hole generated by the metaphorical arrow piercing his chest. He examines the branches of the old oak tree that resides in their front yard, weighed down by late-summer greenery. No cupids in sight.
“Usually,” Tadashi replies a beat too late, followed by an awkward silence.
Then, Tsukishima bends over, retrieving the gaudy orange messenger bag from where he had deposited it on the driveway prior to his reluctant act of heroism. “So, um,” he states.
Tadashi only half-realizes that Tsukishima had arrived here with a task to complete and not atop a steed to rescue him from imminent peril. His mind abuzz with cicada drone, he robotically exchanges a few crumpled bills for a steaming pepperoni pie—Nishinoya’s choice. He idly wonders the last time Nishinoya ingested a nutrient.
“Well, that was riveting," Tsukishima lilts, tossing the messenger bag over his shoulder and bidding Tadashi farewell with a loose flip of his wrist. "See you next Thursday, probably.”
Tadashi doesn’t think he responds. Instead, he stares through the dashboard window, examining the stretch of Tsukishima’s bicep as he reaches across to the passenger side headrest, then leisurely backs out of the driveway.
Somewhere within the thin walls of the rental property, the smoke alarm starts to blare.