Work Text:
“Concern” is too strong of a word to describe Arakita’s feelings going into this semi-reunion-slash-get-together thing they’re doing during break. It’s not as if he’s particularly worried about his high school friends getting along with his current college friends (though, if he considers the matter seriously, there’s undoubtedly room for at least a little bit of awkwardness between Fuku-chan and Miya), given that everybody knows each other already thanks to all the races they’ve participated in, but he can’t help but feel just slightly ill at ease for some reason he can’t quite put his finger on when he and Kinjou and Machimiya head into the barbeque joint they’ve agreed to meet up at with Fukutomi, Shinkai, and Toudou.
He’s not worried, no—not even when Machimiya opens with a joke about being thirsty, in response to which Fukutomi only blinks mildly and asks if he wants some water—at least not until everyone has had a few beers, and their conversation has slid away from cycling and schoolwork to other things, like personal interests and hobbies.
Kinjou has pulled out a deck of cards from somewhere and is showing a simple card trick to Fukutomi and Shinkai, the former of whom stares intently with great curiosity while the latter is quite possibly asleep with his eyes open, and Arakita tries not to sigh too loudly into his bowl of cold edamame. He’s lost count of the times Kinjou has tried this particular trick on someone, and at this point Arakita feels fairly confident he could reproduce it faithfully without even looking at what he was doing.
“Is this your card?” Kinjou asks solemnly, drawing one out seemingly at random from the middle of the deck and brandishing the ace of hearts at Fukutomi.
“Yes, it is,” Fukutomi murmurs, clearly stunned as he takes the card from Kinjou and stares down at it with an adorably incredulous expression, eyebrows drawn with puzzlement. Next to him Shinkai burps loudly and slowly melts down, fat and flat, onto the floor.
“So? What else do you do for fun outside of cycling, Fukutomi?” Kinjou asks conversationally as he perfunctorily shuffles the deck on his knee.
From the other side of the table, Arakita feels a prickle of something race down his spine as Fukutomi levels a stare at Kinjou’s slightly flushed, mellowed-out face, and his fingers tighten fractionally around his cup of cold tea (he would have preferred to drink more, but somebody had to get Kinjou and Machimiya home, and he’d lost today’s round of rock-paper-scissors). Would Fuku-chan mention his love of small, fluffy animals? His latest attempts at driving? His pursuit of all things generously laden with apples?
“I can spin plates,” Fukutomi replies at length, proffering Kinjou the card he had yet to return.
Kinjou’s hand halts mid-reach. “What,” Kinjou says blankly, eyes widening behind his glasses. “Plates?”
“Yes,” Fukutomi nods, and picks up one of the smaller plates from the destruction of their all-you-can-eat binge to show Kinjou, as if he didn’t know what they were, “plates.”
Arakita opens his mouth when he sees a glint gleaming forth from Fukutomi’s eyes, because his gut is giving him a really bad feeling for some reason, but he bites his tongue when Kinjou asks with sincere curiosity about his unusual hobby.
“I just... thought it looked cool,” Fukutomi explains with a little less confidence than usual as he looks down at the plate in his hands. “It’s not that difficult—”
“Do you use a particular kind of plate, or could you hypothetically use anything if it has that rim to it?” Kinjou asks as he leans over a little, brushing his fingers along the protruding bottom lip of the plate, his palm skimming the backs of Fukutomi’s knuckles, and in that moment Arakita swears Fuku-chan goes extra pink around the ears.
Fukutomi clears his throat and begins to turn the plate around in an almost fidgety way, and the same uneasiness returns to Arakita’s stomach (but maybe it’s just the combination of beer, kimchi, and kalbi rolling around in a post-dinner haze) as Fukutomi replies, “It’s easiest if you use a plate made for spinning, as it has an indentation in the middle that makes it easier to keep centered on the stick, but with enough practice you could really use anything, even...”
Then Fukutomi picks up one of the long, slender chopsticks they had used to flip the meat on the grill, and Arakita opens his mouth again, because he can see how this is going to go careening headlong into a tailspin.
Kinjou, at least, seems sober enough to still have some sense of responsibility left to him, and places a hand on Fukutomi’s wrist, stilling Arakita’s words of overbearingly stuffy wisdom in his mouth yet again. “Fukutomi, I’m not sure we ought to be using these plates, and that’s a chopstick, not a—”
“I have been doing this for a few years now, Kinjou,” Fukutomi says firmly, eyebrows bunching, and then, as if to dismiss any further argument, he adds, “I am strong.”
Arakita can appreciate Kinjou’s look of weirdly fond exasperation and genuine concern at Fukutomi casually dropping his catchphrase as a possible excuse for potential total recklessness, but he lets his hand fall away, allowing Fukutomi to carefully set the edge of the plate on the tip of the chopstick and begin to gently twirl it around.
Fukutomi usually wasn’t much for showmanship outside of his overwhelming displays of power on his bike, so Arakita hasn’t had much chance to witness his other talents in action like this. He has to say it’s impressive that the plate actually gets going, spinning evenly like a balanced top on the tip of the wooden chopstick with only the occasional waver that Fukutomi immediately corrects with the most subtle of movements from his wrist and fingers.
“Incredible,” Kinjou breathes with awe in his voice, and Fukutomi covers up the break that causes in his concentration by letting the plate drop lightly back into his hands.
Deep inside, Arakita feels a pang of affection at the way Fukutomi blushes faintly at the praise. “I,” Fukutomi begins, possibly about to launch into another I am strong just to reaffirm to everyone that yes, he was and is still strong, but instead he ends up mumbling, “Thank you, but it’s nothing special.”
There’s a rather dangerous spark to Kinjou’s eye as he asks with total seriousness, “Could you show me how you do it?”
It’s not like Kinjou’s going to really get into plate-spinning or anything, Arakita assures himself silently as he polishes off the last of his drink and looks around to find the pitcher of tea lost somewhere in the table’s mess; Kinjou is just drunk and easily charmed, and Fukutomi was—well, Fukutomi was definitely blushing now on top of his glow, and Arakita’s not entirely sure why. He was probably just very flattered that his highly-respected rival was interested in his personal hobbies, that was all, and it was only proper that Kinjou at least pretend to be interested after Fuku-chan was totally blown away by that simple card trick, right?
Arakita sits back against the wall, glass of tea in hand as he watches Fukutomi try to explain the art of plate-spinning to Kinjou. He’s clearly out of his element describing anything other than cycling and bike maintenance, and Kinjou has to stop him often to ask questions and to reach over and touch Fukutomi’s hands to see what he is doing with them. At some point Kinjou procures his own plate and chopstick and asks for hands-on correction, which Fukutomi does while steadily reddening even further.
“Don’t grip too hard,” Fukutomi says, carefully adjusting the angle of Kinjou’s wrist and the curl of his fingers, “and start slow. Take your time speeding up—”
The plate clinging to Kinjou’s chopstick wobbles and tips over, falling towards Kinjou’s leg, and Fukutomi stretches out a hand to catch it. He overestimates, though, and his palm ends up on Kinjou’s thigh while the plate lands with a soft thud onto the tatami mat floor.
The moment wouldn’t have been nearly so awkward had it not been for the way their eyes lock intensely right afterwards, and not in the way they usually do in the middle of races—Fukutomi is very suddenly invading Kinjou’s personal space, all while keeping a hand very firmly on his thigh. Neither of them moves, staring wide-eyed at each other until Fukutomi very noticeably drops his gaze to Kinjou’s mouth, and then his elbow bends slightly as he slowly inches forward.
Oh no, Arakita thinks with alarm, straightening up with sweat breaking out across the back of his neck, just what was Fuku-chan doing, or about to do?
He gets as far as getting into a crouch, not that he knows quite what he plans on doing from there (jump in between them? loudly demand more food or drinks or both? shove his photos of Aki-chan in their faces?), when Shinkai, in perhaps his timeliest moment yet, releases an earth-shattering fart that makes everything and everyone in the room vibrate a little from its force.
Arakita takes his chance to assist his old ace and whirls to his feet, dramatically throwing open the sliding door to their private room with a screech. “Shinkai, you pig! Don’t fart in here, do you want to kill us all?!”
By the time he turns back around after flapping his jacket toward the empty hallway to fan away some of the rapidly-spreading stench, Fukutomi and Kinjou appear as they did before, plates and chopsticks in hand and studious expressions on their faces. Thank goodness, Arakita exhales with relief into his sleeve, shooting Shinkai a watery-eyed glare softened marginally with gratitude for getting Fuku-chan out of a pinch, even if it wasn’t in the most conventional way.
He figures he can relax a little now that the moment has been dissolved satisfactorily, and he picks up his phone to check on his messages as Fukutomi coaches Kinjou through getting his plate into a horizontal spin. When he glances up every now and then, Kinjou is smiling, pleased at his own progress, and the eternally emotionless set to Fukutomi’s mouth appears to have softened a little at the corners.
“When it starts to slow, just take the stick to the outside again, like this,” Fukutomi instructs with his own spinning plate, twirling his wrist dexterously to demonstrate and then watching Kinjou do the same. “Don’t angle it too much right away, otherwise you’ll unbalance it.”
Kinjou’s eyes crinkle charmingly at the corners, and when he laughs it draws Fukutomi’s gaze. “You’re really good at this, Fukutomi,” he says warmly, patting Fukutomi’s knee with his free hand when he has gotten his plate into a steady spin again.
Fukutomi’s lips part a little and then hang open, and judging by the light sheen of perspiration on his brow, he’s working hard at trying to figure out what to say, but nothing seems to be coming together. He’s been rendered speechless, somehow, by that one small compliment, when Arakita knows Fukutomi’s been lauded with far better (and worse) before, from everyone from first-year brown-nosers back in Hakone to college and professional scouts looking for fresh talent to add to their ranks.
Maybe it was the knee touch, Arakita muses as he scrolls through the latest batch of Aki-chan photos one of his sisters has sent him. Cyclists were all for pushing each other ahead with a hand to the ass, or supporting an exhausted teammate with an arm around the shoulders, or even feeling up each other’s pecs (he and Kinjou had yet to break Machimiya of that particular habit), but the knee? God forbid how salacious a knee-pat could be.
At that moment Toudou returns from his trip to the bathroom to powder his nose or whatever primping he had thought was necessary for a platonic get-together with a bunch of guys, and he also happens to be toting along a very green-faced Machimiya. “Arakita!” Toudou snaps loudly and shrilly, stumbling against the wall under Machimiya's weight, “Your friend here can’t handle his drink!”
“Oogh,” groans Machimiya, raising one hand quickly to his mouth, and Toudou shrieks loudly in an instinctual response to the threat of getting barfed on.
A few different things happen in the handful of seconds right after, and Arakita watches it all happen in slow motion and total, utter resignation.
For starters, Machimiya does not throw up, but when Fukutomi jerks in surprise at the sound of Toudou’s shrill, sharp voice, the spinning plate on the end of his chopstick goes flying—with deadly accuracy and phenomenal force—edge-first straight into Machimiya’s face. Machimiya chokes and reels backward, his fingers hooking into the collar of Toudou’s shirt at the start of his descent, and there’s more screaming and moaning involved as the two of them fall into a disorganized heap of limbs and headband pieces in the hallway.
Meanwhile, Fukutomi’s shoulder had bumped up against Kinjou’s, thus unbalancing Kinjou’s plate and causing it to go whirling away as well. It falls in a particularly graceful arc, landing with an almost anticlimactic thump onto Shinkai’s nose, flat side-down. Shinkai snorts, frowns in his sleep, knocks the plate off his face, and rolls onto his side. Then he passes gas again.
Looking back, Arakita has no idea how he managed to get everyone outside in a calm, orderly fashion—it probably had something to do with Fukutomi silently volunteering to carry Toudou, who was screeching about fractured ribs (Kinjou pressed on them later and assured Toudou that no, his ribs were probably not broken; he would know), while Kinjou put his arm around the sniveling Machimiya’s shoulders and supported his stumbling, bruised, and ego-battered body all the way out the door, which left Arakita to handle Shinkai.
Arakita simply kicks at him until he wakes up. It takes a little while, and he’s pretty sure Shinkai farts again at least once in the process, but he swipes his wallet and puts their tab on Shinkai’s card, so together with saving Fuku-chan from a potential social faux pas courtesy of bodily functions, he considers them more or less even for the time being.
Outside, while Fukutomi apologizes profusely to Machimiya, who seems too dazed to truly appreciate the former captain of Hakogaku bowing his head before him, Arakita sniffs his clothes. So far, all he can smell is the meaty smoke from their grill, and thankfully no lingering offensive bodily odors.
“You broke my headband! Do you know how important this one was to me?” Toudou yells, pointing a finger accusingly at Machimiya and wildly waving the two halves of his lavender hair accessory, and he looks to be on the verge of breaking out into tears. Wouldn’t be the first time, Arakita thinks to himself as he grabs Shinkai by the arm to keep him from tipping over into a bush.
“You look better without it,” Machimiya says, squinting blearily at Toudou and somehow nearly losing his footing despite standing stock still with Kinjou’s support. “Hides that big ol’ forehead of yours.”
Toudou gasps dramatically, and Arakita’s pretty sure he’s never looked so offended before despite Arakita constantly sassing him in much the same way about his headbands back in high school. “How dare you! As if you’re the pinnacle of beauty yourself!”
Machimiya apparently cannot be bothered to care for his self-preservation when drunk and plate-faced, as he retorts with an eye roll and a wheezy laugh, “Well, I can’t say you are, either, at least with the headband.”
Shinkai wakes up briefly to witness Toudou launching himself at Machimiya with an animalistic howl, but he’s asleep and sagging against Arakita’s shoulder by the time Kinjou and Fukutomi step in to pull them apart a second later. Fukutomi deposits Toudou in front of Shinkai, who, as if sensing the responsibility that has just been delegated to him, murmurs a sleepy “Okay, Juichi,” and drapes himself over Toudou like a needy koala, effectively anchoring him in place with the weight of his substantially barbeque-filled belly. Arakita gets Machimiya—this he was half-expecting, though he’s far less enthusiastic and capable than Shinkai about having to restrain someone—and suffers unjustly when Kinjou glowers at him.
“What?” Arakita snaps, struggling with Machimiya’s uncooperative jello limbs. Machimiya has all the luck, alright, if he can go from zero to snooze in less than five seconds. “Don’t look at me like that, Kinjou! How is any of this my fault?”
Kinjou sighs, his gaze softening slightly behind his glasses. “You did say you were going to keep an eye on everyone tonight, didn’t you?”
Arakita gives up and lets Machimiya just melt down to the ground at his feet, and he throws a hand out to try to grab Kinjou by the front of his shirt, but Machimiya is leaning against his legs, and all Kinjou has to do is lean slightly out of the way to avoid him. “You—! Do you have any idea how much I—”
He’s still practically throttling the air when Kinjou calmly walks away to speak to Fukutomi. How dare he, Arakita thinks with a huff as he squats down next to Machimiya, who sighs drowsily and reaches out expectantly for a hug. Arakita reluctantly accepts and pats Machimiya’s head when he is slurringly told that he is “still the best friend a man could ask for,” punctuated by a loud, fragrant burp in the middle.
Meanwhile, Fukutomi and Kinjou are taking up the captainly duty to tie up any loose ends from the night. Arakita is too far away to hear them, but Kinjou is all smiles and shoulder pats, and Fukutomi still hasn’t quite gotten his stone face back yet; in fact, he’s biting his lip and running a hand through his hair as if he were... nervous.
Arakita squints and adjusts Machimiya as if he were holding a small child. This isn’t happening. No way Fuku-chan of all people—
Kinjou and Fukutomi take out their phones and huddle together a moment over them. They already have each other’s numbers (and they text back and forth a lot about nitpicky details and training regimens and Arakita’s deplorable diet), so it has to be something else. He wonders if Fukutomi is into Neko Atsume, because Arakita has yet to make Kinjou succumb to the kitties, and if Fukutomi says so, then clearly it’s worth getting into. Something about how luring cats into your yard requires discipline and strength of will, yadda yadda, but judging by the look on Fukutomi’s face, they’re not talking cats, but something a little more serious.
Fukutomi nods slowly in response to something Kinjou says, and Kinjou pockets his phone, claps Fukutomi on the shoulder one last time, and ambles back to his teammates. “Let’s go home,” he says to them, smiling in a suspiciously pleased manner that doesn’t bode well with Arakita, who decides that he is honestly too tired to bother for the night. If anything, he can weasel something out of Shinkai later, or maybe even Toudou if he promised to buy him a replacement headband.
He and Kinjou heft up the sleep-talking Machimiya between them, bid the old Hakogaku gang farewell, and head back to Yonan.
Arakita doesn’t quite get around to following up with Kinjou later, because it honestly slips his mind. Kinjou doesn’t behave out of the ordinary at all, and neither does Machimiya, for that matter—meaning they’re both their usual annoying selves, pestering him at all hours of the day even when they’re not on their bikes during practice. Machimiya invites himself over to eat Arakita’s stock of snacks and to bum notes and homework answers; Kinjou then invites himself over too, in order to make sure his teammates were actually doing their work and not goofing off together. He doesn’t hear anything special from his friends at Meisou, or anything except the usual whining from Toudou.
A full week passes in much the same way life at university always does, and then he gets a call at an obscene hour of the morning.
Well, it’s eight, which is a perfectly normal hour for someone like Fukutomi or Kinjou to call him, usually for absurd reasons like “Do you want to go out for a morning ride, Arakita?”, as if Arakita is particularly inclined to get his bony ass up any earlier than he absolutely has to only to end up getting baited into a race, more often than not up an insanely steep mountainside. At any rate, he picks up, because only somebody who can look him in the eye and stand toe-to-toe with him without flinching would dare call him at eight in the morning, and they were the kind of tough bastards Arakita didn’t mind occasionally humoring.
It’s Toudou.
“Arakita, do you have any idea what Fuku is planning? I just heard that he wanted to reserve one of the banquet rooms for some kind of—performance? He didn’t really explain, and he wouldn’t tell me even when I asked, so do you have any idea what he’s up to now—”
Toudou has this knack for sounding simultaneously frantic and gossipy, and that’s all on top of his immensely grating voice, which only sounds worse at eight in the goddamn morning.
Arakita hangs up, turns his phone to silent, and goes back to sleep for another blissfully quiet, undisturbed hour.
He runs into Kinjou later while he’s walking across the quad to his physics class, and Kinjou is, as usual, his cheerfully dad-like self, meaning he immediately notices that Arakita seems a little crankier than usual and then proceeds to pin all the blame on Arakita’s personal habits, all while stuffing a high-protein, high-energy granola bar into his hands without asking. “Did you stay up late playing a cat game again, Arakita?” Kinjou admonishes, frowning at the bags under Arakita’s eyes. “Did you remember to drink enough water yesterday? We’re doing endurance drills today—”
“Every fuckin' day is an endurance day, Kinjou, we’re cyclists,” Arakita grumbles, rubbing at his eyes with a stifled yawn. “Did it occur to you, maybe, that being a little tired might not have anything to do with me? Maybe somebody woke me up early, very rudely I might add, with a phone call?”
Kinjou only blinks in response. “Somebody called you this morning?”
They get to their classroom, and Arakita slumps into a seat with a muffled curse. He peels open the disgustingly healthy-looking granola bar and crams half of into his mouth at once, the faster to get it over with. “Yeah, stupid Toudou. He was going on about something to do with Fuku-chan reserving a room at the Toudou-An for some reason, as if I know.” He means to complain at least a little more, but the granola bar, while having a dry, cardboard-like texture going into his mouth, spontaneously develops an extremely sticky tenacity akin to that of mochi in his throat, and he has to chug down some water before he chokes.
Next to him, Kinjou calmly opens his backpack and takes out his notes and a slim pencil bag. “I see,” he murmurs. A moment later the professor, who has a tendency to start lectures early, strides in and flips on the projector, and that’s all the conversing Kinjou and Arakita manage to do for the rest of the hour.
Nothing occurs to him until after practice ends later that day in the evening. Most of the team are laying around in near-comatose states after their endurance runs, but Kinjou goes straight into the showers, changes, and strides on out in a brisk walk, as if his limbs didn’t feel like blocks of lead hanging off his body.
“You see that?” Machimiya says with a grunt as he heaves himself up onto one elbow, pointing out the door at the shadow of Kinjou’s departing figure. “Something’s up.”
Arakita cringes at the feel of sweat practically matting his skin down to the floor, but the thought of getting up sounds even worse. “Yeah, like what? He finally got a girlfriend or something?”
Machimiya flops back down, and the back of one of his hands goes straight into Arakita’s jaw. While Arakita sits up, sputtering and swearing, Machimiya drawls a little breathlessly, “Nah, if he had a girl we’d know about her by now. He’s up to something, man. He hasn’t said anything to you?”
“Nope,” Arakita replies, levering himself back up onto his feet with the totally unnecessary help of Machimiya’s thigh. Machimiya, naturally, begins hollering and grabs for his abused leg, but that only prompts the onset of some other cramp that has him rolling around on the floor in tearful agony that Arakita ignores as he limps over to his locker. He throws it open and leans into it, squinting at the musty shadows inside with a contemplative hum. “Though, now that you mention it...”
That night, he ropes Machimiya into investigating with him with the promise of buying him some meat buns for his trouble. They swing by Kinjou’s place—he’s not there. They try calling and texting—no answer.
Arakita tries Shinkai. “Oh, Juichi?” he says, mumbling around a mouthful of food, how so typically Shinkai. “He went out a little while ago, said he had something to do. He’s been sneaking around a lot lately.”
Exchanging glances with Machimiya, Arakita thanks Shinkai (“Hey, I gotta go, but put that power bar down once in a while, will ya?”) and then immediately calls Fukutomi.
Fukutomi picks up after two rings, reliable as ever. He sounds a little breathless when he answers. “Arakita, good evening.”
Machimiya’s eyebrows have practically disappeared into his hairline by now, and he’s making some incredibly rude gestures with his hands that involve stabbing two fingers of one hand through a circle he’s made with the fingers of the other. Arakita swats at him and then kicks him in the shin for good measure. Over Machimiya’s wails of adding another two meat buns to his tab, Arakita says loudly, “Heeey, Fuku-chan, what’s up? Can I talk to Kinjou? I’ve been looking for him.”
“Of course,” Fukutomi intones, and then, a dramatic pause follows a very small, strangled sound that he emits. “I—I mean—”
Arakita scrunches up his nose. So his instincts had been right about this one. “Fuku-chan... Just what are you doing with Kinjou? Where are you guys, even?”
“They’re at a love hotel, obviously,” Machimiya hisses, still clutching at his shin. Arakita punches him in the shoulder next.
Fukutomi’s silence is deep for several long seconds, and then he inhales slowly. “We’re practicing for a... performance.”
He thinks back to the hazy details of the phone call from Toudou that morning. “Is this why you’re renting out some banquet room at Toudou’s place? You’re putting on a performance there?”
“Yes,” Fukutomi replies evenly. “As it turns out, well...”
The reluctance in Fukutomi’s voice immediately piques Arakita’s curiosity, but on the other hand, if he were going to such lengths to be secretive about this performance, there was probably a good reason for it. “Look, Fuku-chan, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. We were just, uh, a little worried... I guess... about Kinjou sneakin’ off somewhere. But if you’re keeping tabs on him, then we’re fine.”
Fukutomi clears his throat, and he actually sounds a little sheepish. “It’s for a family event, and Kinjou volunteered his help. If you wish to attend, I can send you an invite.”
He’s not sure how interested he really is in going, but morbid curiosity makes him say, “Sure, why not,” and shortly thereafter he hangs up. He looks down at Machimiya writhing next to him and gets to his feet. “So Fuku-chan and Kinjou are in cahoots, but it doesn’t sound like trouble. You want those meat buns of yours, Machimiya?”
A couple of days later, he gets an envelope in the mail with a glossy little postcard inside that announces a small celebration in honor of Mr. and Mrs. Fukutomi’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary next weekend, with the promise of a lavish banquet and drinks and entertainment.
Arakita squints at it and feels that same prickle of uneasiness from their small reunion before. When he sees Kinjou the next day in class, he asks him bluntly, “You’re not putting Fuku-chan in a box and cutting him up, are you?”
Kinjou looks mildly affronted. “Absolutely not. Fukutomi’s build isn’t nearly slight enough to fit comfortably into those boxes, though,” he stops to scrutinize Arakita, “if you’re interested, Arakita, you might be—”
“No thank you,” Arakita interrupts flatly, sighing as their professor starts the lecture, four minutes before the hour.
He sees his phone light up with a call from Toudou while he’s in class, and he immediately rejects it, figuring whatever Toudou has to say can wait until after. Toudou is nothing but thorough, though, and he leaves three more missed calls once Arakita turns his phone over after the second time he dismisses the incoming call notification.
Once class is over, he grabs his things and mashes the call button angrily while power-walking out of the room. Toudou doesn’t even get in a hello before Arakita is practically spitting at him through the line. “Is someone dying? Are you dying? Or are you just calling to tell me you broke another headband? Because I don’t give a shit about your hair accessories, Toudou, I’m with Machimiya on this one—”
“Hey! Leave the headbands out of this, okay?” Toudou snaps, huffing haughtily when Arakita snorts at him. “Look, I was calling about Fuku’s thing, the performance?”
Arakita glances over his shoulder to make sure Kinjou wasn’t tailing him—nowhere in sight, probably still talking to the professor—and drops himself onto a bench around the corner of the building, out of sight in the off-chance Kinjou came walking this way. He’s not sure why he feels compelled to be sneaky when Kinjou knows that Arakita knows, but somehow it seems appropriate, as if he were still valiantly attempting to defend Fukutomi’s honor. “Yeah, what about it?” he asks wearily.
“So, the thing is...” Toudou begins, and Arakita can practically hear him twirling his hair over his finger, “I kind of got roped into helping out, and I thought—”
He doesn’t even know what Toudou’s getting at, but Arakita gives him a perfunctory and very adamant “No” before he can gets much further. “You’re on your own if Kinjou wants to put you in a box and cut you up,” he tells Toudou matter-of-factly. Knowing Toudou, he probably just wanted to wear the assistant’s outfit, and he suppresses a shiver at the thought. Ugh.
“Would you let me finish,” Toudou bites out, grumbling under his breath. “Mr. and Mrs. Fukutomi know us, right? So my parents thought we could do the serving, make it more intimate, you know? Are you following me, Arakita?”
Arakita is groaning before Toudou even finishes his last sentence. “You’re saying I have to... goddamn it.” He’s having flashbacks to that stupid butler café they had to do for the cultural festival back in high school, where all of the girls who visited them always demanded that he switch with either Toudou or Shinkai. “Is Shinkai in on this too, at least?”
“If you and I are on board, Shinkai will do it,” Toudou says airily. “Well, I mean, he’ll probably be eating the entire time while the two of us do the actual work, but Mrs. Fukutomi thinks he’s adorable or whatever, so there’s that at least.”
How did it come to this, Arakita wonders as he gives Toudou a very noncommittal yes and then shoves himself up from the bench to head to his next class.
True to Toudou’s predictions, Shinkai spends most of every free moment available to him stealing food from the kitchens, but after getting his knuckles rapped with a wooden spoon at least half a dozen times by Toudou—who is wearing a non-standard issue white apron with frills at the shoulders—he seems to take the hint and only sneaks nibbles when Toudou’s back is turned. Arakita gets scolded every other five minutes for looking murderous, not that he can help it when pretty much every little old lady of the Fukutomi clan seems to recognize him and practically sing in chorus about how he’s “grown up into such a fine young man,” much to Toudou and Shinkai’s amusement.
“Maybe you can get yourself a sugar mama, Yasutomo,” Shinkai grins with a wink, and Arakita slaps his hand out of midair before he can even get around to making his trademark gun pose.
Dinner has been served, and Arakita, Shinkai, and Toudou are taking a breather in the staff room when Kinjou bursts in. It’s the first time any of them have seen him the entire evening, and he’s dressed in the typical magician getup: swishy tailcoat, cape with flashy red lining, a top hat, and—
“Kinjou,” Arakita says, choking on his mouthful of miso soup, “is that—did you—paint a goatee onto yourself?”
Toudou is making muffled high-pitched noises into his hands. He’s either sobbing or laughing or both, and a moment later he slides out of his seat and scurries out of the room, his face about as red as Kinjou’s cape.
“Very nice, Shingo-kun,” Shinkai adds helpfully in English, giving him a thumbs up in approval.
Kinjou, meanwhile, only glances to and fro with obvious concern, and then he turns and peeks back out into the hallway. “Arakita, have you seen Fukutomi anywhere?” he asks breathlessly, dabbing at the sweat beading on his forehead with a handkerchief he produces from a vest pocket.
Arakita finds it’s quite helpful to not look at Kinjou at all, otherwise he risked launching into a giggling fit over that awful fake facial hair of his. He takes a swig of his Bepsi and answers in a slightly strained voice, “Fuku-chan? Nope, haven’t seen him at all. He’s not with you?”
“He was, and then he said he needed a moment to clear his mind before we went up, and he hasn’t come back since!” Kinjou starts pacing quickly, his cape whipping around him dramatically with every turn he makes. “Our performance is in fifteen minutes, but we need to set up before we—”
From another part of the Toudou-An comes a strangled screech, distinctly Toudou in pitch and volume. Kinjou immediately runs out in the direction of the scream, followed closely by Arakita, and a little ways behind them at a leisurely jog, Shinkai, who is popping slices of a peeled orange into his mouth. They turn a couple of corners and shortly find Toudou on the floor by an open storage closet, broom gripped in both his hands. Fukutomi is crouched down next to him, trying to be reassuring and most likely failing, judging by the deep pallor of Toudou’s face.
Arakita takes one look at the scene and is utterly unsurprised. “Fuku-chan, did you sneak up on him?”
Fukutomi’s head jerks up, his mouth flapping open and shut for a few seconds as he pieces together his thoughts. “It—It wasn’t my intention to,” he mumbles, and when Kinjou strides toward him he actually cringes a little in embarrassment and hangs his head, as if expecting a scolding.
Kinjou kneels down and touches Fukutomi’s arm gently, his voice clipped but not unkind. “Are you all right, Fukutomi? We need to go prepare for our performance.”
They share a long look that makes Arakita tense a little, because he’s getting a whiff of that same something from the evening at the barbeque joint, and this time it has nothing to do with Shinkai’s bad habit of overeating.
Fukutomi rises to his feet with Kinjou, and before he heads on back to the banquet room he apologizes to the still-quivering Toudou, “I’m sorry for startling you.”
Arakita totally does not miss how Kinjou grabs Fukutomi by the wrist as they hustle away down the corridor, or the faint pink flush high on Fukutomi’s cheeks. But Fukutomi also still looks more than a little uncertain of what he's heading into, so to be the supportive friend he always is, Arakita turns and shouts after them, “Fuku-chan! You got this!”
When Fukutomi glances back over his shoulder at him, Arakita gives him a double thumbs-up with as much confidence as he can muster. They turn the corner and disappear, and once their footsteps have faded away, Arakita rounds on Shinkai and Toudou. “Get your ass up, Toudou, we need to clear away the food before they go up on stage,” he orders while beginning to stomp away, tugging Shinkai along by the elbow.
“Arakita,” Toudou squeals, stumbling to his feet and scrambling after Arakita and Shinkai, “there’s something wrong with Fuku!”
If there’s anything in the world that will always reliably make Arakita stop whatever he’s doing, it’s some kind of proclamation, insinuation, whatever, that his old ace might need him. So he stops dead in his track and swings back around toward Toudou, eyes narrowing as he grabs him by the shoulders, ready to shake an explanation out of him if necessary. “Yeah?” he breathes, teeth already bared, “What’s wrong with Fuku-chan, Toudou?”
Getting into close quarters with Toudou while he’s holding a broom was probably a bad idea, as Toudou immediately begins thrashing about, whacking any available parts of Arakita that he can with the thick wooden handle. “Don’t grab me like that, Arakita! Getting your grimy hands all over my—”
“That’s beside the point right now, Toudou!” Arakita yells, wrenching the broom out of Toudou’s hands and giving him a good knock on that big forehead of his for good measure. While Toudou is sniveling over his new bruise, Arakita leans down, arms crossed over his chest. “So? What’s up with Fuku-chan? Huh?”
Toudou gives him an impressive stinkeye, but after a moment he falters and haltingly explains, “He just suddenly showed up behind me, whispering ‘Kinjou, Kinjou’ to himself over and over! He sounded murderous! I thought he was some kind of evil spirit or something at first!”
“Is the Toudou-An haunted now, Jinpachi?” Shinkai asks cheerfully, pulling another orange out of his apron pocket. Arakita reaches over and confiscates that as well, but Shinkai just calmly produces another one and offers it to Toudou. “I have one more, if you’d like.”
Arakita wants to clutch his head, but now both of his hands are full and they’re quickly running out of time to get back and clean up before the performance. So he drops the orange back into Shinkai’s pocket and thrusts the broom back into Toudou’s hands and stalks away, talking loudly in reassurance to himself as he goes and hoping his two idiot friends would get the hint and follow. “You know what? Fuku-chan is okay! He’s okay! Because he’s with Kinjou!”
Toudou, at least, understands the importance of hustling, even if he’s being annoying like usual as he scampers after Arakita. “Even though he sounded like he was going to kill him?”
Arakita throws an arm around Toudou’s shoulders and holds him in a sort of half-assed headlock while dragging him down the hall back to the banquet room. Through gritted teeth, he says, again in self-assurance, “Look, Fuku-chan’s—he’s—just trust me on this, okay? Fuku-chan’s gonna be just fine! Now get your ass moving, Shinkai!”
Much to Arakita’s relief, Fukutomi does absolutely fine. You might even say he does spectacularly, given the fancy plate-spinning tricks he and Kinjou pull off flawlessly in total seamless coordination. Plates fly through the air, Kinjou flaps around with his cape and makes women swoon and things disappear, and Fukutomi strikes ridiculous poses with his stone face that cause most of the elderly and aging among the audience to laugh so hard that they sounded like they were leaving this life for the next. The end of their grand performance is met with loud applause and whistling, and as they file offstage Arakita releases a breath he hadn’t known he was holding.
“See, Fuku-chan was fine,” he tells Toudou proudly, jabbing an elbow into his side with a pointy grin.
Toudou glares but doesn’t do more than shove him and Shinkai out the side door and back to the kitchens. After they served dessert, their term of service would be up; staff from the Toudou-An would take care of clean-up and teardown, and Arakita would finally be free.
Arakita hands out the last bowl of almond jelly and walks as fast as was proper out of the banquet room, his hands already tugging at the tight double-knot Toudou had wound his apron strings into. He toes the sliding door shut behind him, heads back to the kitchens to drop off his tray, and is in the process of wriggling his way out of his apron when he spots Toudou and Shinkai hovering very suspiciously by the back door that led outside.
He shuffles up to them and notices that Shinkai is shoveling leftover almond jelly into his mouth. Of course. “Hey,” he begins gruffly, “what are you two—”
Toudou whirls around and slaps a hand over his mouth with lightning fast speed. “Shh!”
Arakita frowns from behind Toudou’s palm. He would bite him, except, ew, Toudou. Instead he knocks Toudou’s arm away and jabs his thumb toward the yard area outside with a raised eyebrow. Toudou nods seriously and returns to his spot opposite Shinkai beside the door, and Arakita, knowing he wasn’t about to see anything around Shinkai’s bulk, wedges himself next to Toudou and cranes his head as far out as he can.
He hears them before he sees them. Their voices come from behind a stack of boxes and crates, and the only things visible are the shadows they cast in the moonlight. Kinjou says solemnly, “Fukutomi, I don’t understand. If it’s not today’s performance you want to discuss, then what is it?”
Oh. Oh.
Arakita’s skin prickles with the anticipation of something possibly terrible, and part of him wants to run to help—and the other part wants to run away. Please don’t do this to Fuku-chan, he prays to the benevolent bike gods above as he clutches his wadded-up apron in his hands.
Fukutomi takes a step forward, the shape of his head and shoulders appearing as a long, stretched-out silhouette on the outer wall of the inn. “Kinjou,” he says, voice deeper and throatier than usual, “I...”
Toudou claps his hands over his own mouth to muffle his soap opera gasp. Arakita glances down and swears he can see the loose wisps of Toudou’s bangs practically lifting off his forehead with excitement, and for some reason it reminds him, rather uncomfortably, of Manami.
“Fukutomi?” Kinjou murmurs with surprise, and he utters a soft, startled sound as Fukutomi’s shadow advances. Their footsteps stumble and mingle, and a single loud breath escapes Kinjou as he presumably gets pushed up against a wall. “Fukutomi, what are—”
Suddenly, silence. Toudou trembles, Shinkai continues to slurp up jelly, albeit with some more restraint than usual, and Arakita holds his breath, his knuckles white around his apron.
After several long seconds of nothing but the sound of chirping crickets, Kinjou asks as if rousing himself from a trance, “What... was that?”
“Kinjou,” Fukutomi whispers meaningfully, “please understand.”
Clothes rustle and feet shift. Kinjou clears his throat and says crisply, “No, I do not. Please explain yourself, Fukutomi.”
Arakita presses a hand to his eyes and heaves a long, quiet sigh. “Fuku-chan,” he mumbles to himself, feeling guilty—for eavesdropping, and for failing Fukutomi. He should have seen this coming, should have deterred him or at least prepared him; he felt something was off from the very beginning, from that moment Kinjou took out his deck of cards and flashed the ace of hearts and made Fukutomi go bright red and noodly. He could and definitely should have done something to keep two of his closest friends from winding up in a horrifically awkward situation like the one that was presently unfolding; he was their assist after all.
Fukutomi tries to say something, but it comes out as a croak. He swallows audibly, coughs, and then tries again. “I... I like you, Kinjou. I like you—very much. My feelings for you are... They’re...”
Shinkai hums around his spoon and points his BQN out the door before Arakita can think to stop him. “You can do it, Juichi,” he says, winking into the darkness.
“—strong,” Fukutomi finishes firmly, and Arakita thinks he hears Kinjou stifle a snort, however faintly. Toudou, meanwhile, does snort, very audibly at that, and Arakita reaches down and covers up his mouth to ensure that Toudou doesn’t make any more noise that could reveal their presence (and if this accidentally includes covering his nose and choking off his airway, well, he could take one for the team).
Before Kinjou can respond, Fukutomi adds hesitantly and with incredibly blush-inducing earnestness, “I like you very much, Kinjou. Do I... make myself clear?”
Kinjou breathes in slowly and deeply. Arakita feels his back muscles stiffen, and he must have unconsciously tightened his hands around Toudou’s face, because he begins to struggle in earnest underneath him. “Yes, Fukutomi, you did,” he says with an almost aggravating amount of calmness. “And what now?”
Fukutomi pauses, clearly taken aback. “What now?”
There’s a familiar smirk in Kinjou’s voice, and while it almost never fails to rile Arakita up, there’s something soft about it this time that suggests fondness rather than his usual smugness when it's directed at Fukutomi. “Is there anything else?”
After pondering the question for a while, Fukutomi asks with firm resolution, “Will you go out with me, Kinjou?”
Kinjou laughs warmly. “Yes,” he answers with total sincerity, and again they hear movement, of bodies coming close to one another and bumping up against the wall. Arakita feels himself go a little limp with relief, and Toudou starts squirming agitatedly under his weight.
Fukutomi makes a small, concerned sound. “Can I kiss you again?”
“You don’t have to ask now,” Kinjou replies cheekily, and the poignant quiet that falls over the yard immediately thereafter is broken only by the sound of heavy breaths and the unmistakable wet press of mouths meeting.
Arakita feels a weird and most definitely gross sense of accomplishment at hearing two of his good friends make out, but now is no time to be resting on his laurels. “Okay, let’s leave them alone now,” he hisses, hauling Toudou bodily away from the door and kicking at Shinkai’s rear. He drags all of them out to the hallway before dumping Toudou at his feet and then, with a very self-satisfied sigh, he throws his balled-up apron at the floor. “I’m done,” he announces brightly, suddenly cheerful, and there’s a spring in his step as he heads down the hall to grab his things from the staff room.
“Oi, Arakita!” Toudou calls sharply after him, clearly irritated at how often he was being manhandled that evening, “What about Fuku and Kinjou?”
Arakita twirls on his feet and flashes them a double BQN. Toudou looks aghast; Shinkai smiles sunnily. “If Kinjou comes by, tell him he’s supposed to go home with Fuku-chan! I’m heading back to Yonan ‘cause I have a paper, so bye!”
He books it out of there before anybody else can hail him down, and it’s not until he’s on the train heading back to Shizuoka that he finally pulls out his phone. He’s about to privately text Fukutomi congratulations on netting Kinjou, but as he watches notifications from the group chat roll in—Toudou is complaining about how Arakita gave him a concussion (drama queen) and how much Shinkai ate, and Shinkai has nothing but the highest praise for the Toudou-An’s food—he decides to refrain, given that the others are clearly also dancing around the topic. Let him tell them on his own time.
Kinjou, though. Arakita isn’t about to keep this a secret from Machimiya, mostly because it’s impossible to keep secrets from Machimiya, so come Monday they would take him out for drinks and get it straight from his mouth, and that would also be when Arakita makes the necessary drunken declaration that should Kinjou break Fuku-chan’s heart, he would break Kinjou’s face.
His phone buzzes in his hand with a text.
Thank you for all your help, Arakita, it says, all proper and dad-like, and Arakita rolls his eyes despite the grin he’s trying in vain to smother down.
He types back, yeah yeah have fun with fuku-chan. you can borrow my lab notes later
Kinjou actually replies with (^ _ ^)/, and Arakita almost shudders. He was definitely going to bring that up with Kinjou during their powwow on Monday, because that? That was definitely not okay, no matter the amount of necking Kinjou might have gotten up to with Fukutomi.
He sends out one last text to Machimiya to let him know he was on his way, and then he pockets his phone, closes his eyes, and leans back into the lumpy train seat. All that fuss over one anniversary party, he thinks with a wide yawn, and with his mind finally at ease with a job well done, he falls asleep to the steady clack-clack of the train as it winds its way home.