Work Text:
Niragi wakes up to the sound of screams coming from the living room and a door being slammed. He blinks the dizziness from sleep away, waves around until he finds his glasses, and crawls out of the bed with a groan.
He doesn’t even bother to open the curtains. Niragi just checks his phone, sees a four, and just wants to know why there are people making a mess in his house in the middle of the night.
“Hello people who don’t live here,” he says, dragging his feet to the living room where there’s a bit too much light for it to be the middle of the night. “Why are you at my house at 4 in the morning?”
He can barely keep his eyes open, but it looks like a pretty big meeting. Maybe this is some kind of intervention? Maybe he needs an intervention. Or Chishiya. Yeah it must be about Chishiya, because he's fine.
“Suguru, dear, it’s four in the afternoon,” Kuina says, walking to him. “Hello? Earth to Niragi?”
She waves a hand in front of his face, and Niragi slaps it away with a groan.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“When was the last time you got some good sleep, man? I think you’re starting to get delusional,” Tatta, who for some reason is also here, adds. “You are three shades paler than usual. And that means you're translucent."
“I went to sleep a few minutes past midnight. It wasn’t that late,” he pinches the bridge of his nose. It can’t be that late. There’s no way he slept for sixteen hours. He hasn’t slept more than six hours since he has memory, and he’s not starting at twenty-five. “One of us doesn’t know how to read a clock.”
“Yeah, you,” Arisu shows him his phone. Niragi can’t see it from this distance, but he recognizes the text bubbles from a chat. “You told me, and I quote, `I’ll tell you about it tomorrow. I’m going to bed now,’ at like, 1 pm. Dude, your sleep schedule is more fucked than mine.”
Well.
That could explain the light.
And why there are people at his house in the middle of the night, because it’s not the middle of the night but the middle of the afternoon.
And it’s not the first time he mistakes the small am. letters in his phone for pm. ones. His eyesight gets even worse when he’s tired.
Niragi drags a hand down his face with a groan and ignores the laughs across the room. Usagi, bless her heart, pats his back and offers him her cup of coffee, which he gladly takes.
And then, he notices something.
There’s one particular annoying idiot who hasn’t laughed at him yet.
“Where’s the asshole?”
Because Chishiya isn't sitting at the table with everyone else.
“He was called for an emergency or something,” Kuina says as she opens a new bag of snacks. “He just left.”
So that’s why he woke up to the sound of a door being slammed. That doesn’t explain what everyone is everyone doing sitting at his table in the middle of the afternoon.
On a Wednesday.
“And why are you still here if that idiot left?”
“You were home,” Arisu points. “So we had no reason to leave.”
“I was sleeping,” Niragi has been awake for five minutes, and he already wants to go back to bed. What kind of person leaves their house unattended and raided by a bunch of idiots? Why did Chishiya not kick everyone out?
“Well, you’re awake now. Can we keep playing?”
Niragi looks at the table. He expected a deck of cards or Catan, not the ultimate betrayal that makes the last remains of sleep go away. He doesn’t even know how he took so long to notice the dices and the DM screen and how Kuina is wearing the blue bikini top because she loves to play in character.
There’s a new addition to the usual layout, one of those Tokyo maps tourists use sitting upon it, and, on top of that, two pieces. One is the car player piece from Monopoly. The other an ugly pink Hot Wheels.
“What are you even doing?”
“King of Spades,” three different voices say at the same time, and Niragi is about to kick them out of his house.
“You started playing face cards without me?” he asks, or more like screams, as he drags one of the chairs to sit down. “Fucking traitors!”
“You were sleeping,” Usagi points out.
“And your character is not even here. We still haven’t even checked if you’re still alive,” Chota laughs from behind the DM screen. Karube is lounging on the couch, leaving the work to his friend. “Aguni did a number on you. You’d better get a new character ready just in case.”
“I’m not playing a new character! It wouldn’t even make sense to add a new character to the second stage!”
Chota waves him off, and Karube scoffs, and everyone around the table ignores him, so Niragi gives up, crosses his arms in front of his chest, and gestures towards the table.
“Care to explain what is going on then?”
In addition to the cars, the map is also covered with bottle caps with different symbols drawn with a black marker. Face cards symbols, Niragi is not that dumb. That must be the new game arenas.
“What are the rules?”
“The Second Stage started without a warning,” Kuina explains, munching into her lollipop stick. “No warning, no anything, bullets just started raining from the sky,” her long nails tap the King of Spade symbol. “He moves and is chasing us for sport. We’re running away from him, and there wasn’t a rule explanation or time limit.”
So they’re fucked.
It seems like their friends are going to make the second part of the campaign hell.
“We were running from him,” Usagi adds, pointing at Arisu, Kuina, and herself. “Well, and Chishiya, but you know how his rolls are when it comes to any kind of physical activity.”
“Please don’t tell me I missed Chishiya's death.”
That would ruin his day. His whole week. He and Chishiya have been trying, and failing, to kill each other's characters since they started to play D&D. The competition has been tied in 0-0 deaths since their first year of college.
“Nah,” Kuina points at Ann and Tatta next. “We were running when they showed up with a car to pick us up. Chishiya had some bad rolls and fell behind. So he’s not in the car with us, but he’s pretty much alive, and since the King is chasing us now, he’s probably safer than us.”
So, hunting game.
A really extreme version of Tag.
Only Chishiya could be separated from the group just for a call from work to arrive. He has such good timing for everything.
“So you trapped yourselves in a metal box that can explode instead of hiding in a proper place?”
Five pairs of eyes turn to him.
“Whatever, keep going,” he leans against the back of the chair. Seeing others play has always been pretty entertaining for him. Specially this bunch of idiots that for some reason he has in his life.
With their messy schedules and work, most of the time they need to play the campaign in small one-shots or make different groups. They end up scattered around Tokyo, but that just allows them for more flexibility and to play more games and, from time to time, change the DM if someone has an idea for a good game.
It’s a good method now that they’re all adults with less time to spare.
Chota clears his throat and keeps going wherever they left it.
“Tatta is driving, trying to avoid cars and the debris that covers the road. Next to him, Ann takes the passenger seat, but she’ looking at the back of the car so she can talk with Arisu, Kuina, and Usagi. None of you are injured for the moment. You’re escaping from the King of Clubs. You were talking about the rules of the game.”
Arisu shifts. He leans into the table, resting his elbows over it so he can rest his chin over his hands. He’s back in character: “I was saying that our best chance to win this is to defeat all the face cards. We don’t know if that will take us back home, but we need to try. We can’t afford to run out of Visa days.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I keep driving,” Tatta says. “Away from Shibuya.”
“Okay,” Chota eyes his notes, and the rest of the table doesn’t seem to notice the way he looks over at Karube, who has an evil smile on his face. None of them but Niragi. Oh, those two have something planned. He knows them too well by now. “You’re driving, and you notice a car behind you. Same type as the one you’re driving. They’re following you at a slow pace. From the rearview mirror, you can see bright shirts and faces you know. So you stop paying attention to them.”
Everyone around the table nods, but they eye each other warningly. The extra detailing of the car following them is strange.
“Just because we get through all the face cards safely that doesn’t mean we make it back home,” Ann says, eyes narrowing into a thin line of fury.“You don’t believe Hatter bullshit now, do you?”
“Well, the Second Stage did start after collecting all the numbered cards, just like he said,” Arisu volleys back. “None of us knew how things worked out. We had to figure it out on the way to survive. Now, it’s the same, but with new rules, we need to keep going to figure everything out again. The rules make sense.”
“You just wanted them to make sense, to be truth.”
“No,” Arisu and Ann characters have always been too similar and too different. Two different types of smart people, cramped together in a car. “There’s a pattern, a set of rules the games always follow.”
No one wants to add to Arisu's reasoning, and the table falls silent, which gives Chota an opening, and that evil smile grows wider.
“The car following you speeds up, just enough to be parallel with yours.”
“Hey! Beach guys!” Tatta exclaims. “We can make a bigger team! It would be good for clubs!”
Naïve.
Does he really think they’re about to acquire a bunch of NPC allies?
“You look at the car. But there are no bright shirts and familiar faces inside. Just one man, covered in a black cloak, who raises his hand and fires his gun at your car.”
“Fuck!”
“I duck!”
“I duck too! We all duck!”
Karube laughs from the couch, finally getting up to sit down at the table so he can witness everything going downhill. Niragi observes as everyone grabs their dice to see if they can duck in time or if everything is going to end with a bullet to their brain, which would be a really sad start to the Face Cards game.
He leans closer to Karube and whispers to him.
“Three thousand, they blow up the car,” Niragi says.
“Five thousand Ann is the one blowing the car,” Karube offers him his hand to shake, and, with that, they keep witnessing the mess the session has turned into in just a second.
“I shove Tatta out of the driver’s seat and take his place,” Ann is saying. She rolls a 17. “I step into the gas at full force.”
Fuck.
This looks like Niragi is going to lose a bet.
Ann drives like crazy in real life, and it seems like her character picks after her because an hour later they end the session with the group being apart again and without a car because Ann did indeed crash it. She is now separated from the main group, while the other four hide inside a building.
They make a plan to grab food and a car. Usagi and Arisu’s characters have some deep conversation about the meaning of life, and they decide to go for the King of Clubs as their first real game.
Somehow, Tatta now owns a red convertible, which doesn’t seem safe with the King of Spades around, but they let him be and end the session with them heading towards the port where the King of Clubs’ zeppelin floats in the distance.
“Man, that was intense,” Kuina says, leaning back in the chair until it rests on just two legs. “If this was just the transition chapter between stages, I don’t know what to expect.”
Chota and Karube smile, but they don’t say anything.
“Just start looking for your next free day. We’re going to need a long session for the King.”
“Are you going to tell me this time, or I won’t be invited to a D&D session in my own house?”
“We’ll see,” Arisu says, shoving him with his shoulder in his way out. “Give us a break from your stupid, overpowered character.”
“I call it a good build and balanced skills.” Niragi and Arisu had always been the ones with better builds, and during this campaign they’re having so much fun trying to surpass the other. “See you, now leave!”
“Actually, can Karube and I stay?” Chota says “So we can figure out what to do with Mister Fried Chicken.”
Niragi shrug. The damage is already done since the day he followed Arisu into this group.
“Sure, whatever,” he even ignores the fried chicken joke. “Kick everyone else out as I get dinner started.”
Instead of that, Chota yaps to the others for another thirty minutes, and Karube disappears into the balcony for a cigarette break.
Fucking assholes.
Chishiya arrives a few minutes after everyone leaves.
He’s tired, but it wasn’t a bad guard at all. The doctor at his residency only needed a hand to handle some documents, and he had sent Chishiya home early with an apology. And he wasn’t going to admit it, but he really wanted that apology because he had been having fun with the campaign. It’s not often that they can reunite, and even if his character wasn’t there, he would have liked to see what happened after he left.
Karube and Chota are still on the couch when he walks into the living room. They’re having dinner on the couch, and the house smells like Niragi’s family secret spicy noodles. His stomach roars, and his friends wave at him with their mouths stuffed full of food.
“What are you still doing here?”
“Plan what to do with this fucker character,” Karube says, pointing at Niragi, who can be seen in the kitchen. “You’re going to be so happy about this.”
He adds a stupid amount of o’s to the so, and Chishiya narrows his eyes.
“What happened?”
“He got all his saving throws right. Niragi is still pretty much alive.”
“He was burned alive,” Chishiya drops in the armchair, legs tucked under his body. “Twice.”
“And we got two DMs here to confirm that I did, indeed, succeed at all my saving throws.” Niragi walks into the room with two new steamy bowls in hand. He offers Chishiya one and sits on the floor with the other. “What? I heard you opening the door, and you’re annoying when you’re hungry.”
Chishiya looks at Niragi and, for a moment, doesn’t know what to say. Because Niragi makes too much food all the time. And then he calls it leftovers but never gives them to Chishiya directly. He just implies that he can take them if he wants.
And it’s not like he needs to pretend to be a good roommate in front of Karube and Chota. They already know that Niragi is an idiot.
“Do we really need to keep him alive? I torched him for a reason.”
“I should have poisoned your dinner,” Niragi ignores him and keeps talking to Chota and Karube. “So I’m alive, but I take extra damage, you said?”
“Yes, you run slower, and you take two extra points of damage after an attack now.”
Chishiya shoves the noodles in his mouth to contain a groan.
Of course they want Niragi to keep playing. They love the chaos his character brings so much.
If Chishiya and Niragi always try to kill each other, everyone else has a game of trying to redeem Niragi's shitty characters in every single campaign. His roommate loves playing evil and terrible assholes, and their friends have challenged themselves to turn at least one of Niragi’s characters onto the right path.
They haven’t succeeded in all these years, and neither has Chishiya.
“So he’s alive and well? All limbs attached? Still able to take any of us down because, let me remind you, you,” and he points at Karube with his chopsticks, “allowed him to be a sharpshooter.”
That had been an interesting session, in fact, back when they were playing the 10 of Hearts.
“I climb into the roof, the one facing the pool, and sit in the ground with my rifle. I point it at the idiots running around and start to shoot them down. I grab my walkie-talkie and tell the other militants to push everyone outside, where I can shoot them so they’re easier to carry to the fire pit.”
There’s a moment of silence. Everyone stares at Niragi. When they think that he’s bad, he always pulls something like this to make his character even worse.
“Okay, but this is stupid. Why does your character even know how to be a sharpshooter?”
Until now, Niragi's character has been good with weapons. But climbing a roof and shooting people from there sounds a bit too much for his skill sets. It may take the gaming buddies privileges from Arisu, but he’ll take the risk. And not only because they’re fucked if the Niragi character can actually pull that stunt.
“He was a game developer who signed into a shooting rink to get firsthand experience to develop a first-person game,” Niragi says, leaning back into his chair. The fact that that was an idea that crossed his mind is worrying. But at least he hasn’t pulled something so stupid in real life. Or at least, if he has done it, no one knows it.
“That’s stupid!” Arisu is about to throw the dices at his face. He can’t have such a cool character and get away with it. A Diamond player passing as a Spades one? That was already enough of a twist when he showed up to save their asses in the 10 of Diamonds as Chota's last resort because Chishiya wasn’t available to play that day.
“Whatever, roll 20.” Sadly for Arisu, Karube is a laid-back DM. As long as it brings chaos and fun to the game, he lets it pass.
“20.”
“We go with the stupid nerd-to-sharpshooter thing,” Karube says, taking note of the new ability.
“Yes!”
“No!”
Two voices scream at the same time.
“Then I demand my character can drive because he played too much GTA,” Arisu throws the dice and facepalms into the table. “5.”
“Congratulations, your character has failed his driving exam 3 times.”
Chishiya has fond memories of that day because torching Niragi’s character has been the most satisfying thing he has done during this campaign.
“He’s covered in all grades of burns. With third-degree ones, he won’t even feel the pain or the damage done because his nerves will be fried, so he won’t be able to tell when he’s doing even more damage. Probably impaired vision, he surely has intoxication, infected burns, and maybe damaged lungs if Aguni and he spent too much time inside the Beach when it caught fire. And I haven’t taken into acount the possible impact fractures from falling from the roof into a pool.”
“You only survived the Tag game because you’re a lucky bastard who used the lift like a lazy cat to get to the seventh floor, and then Chota rolled a fucking six when it came to choose in what floor the tagger showed up in,” Niragi throws a pillow at him, and Chishiya ducks as he gives him the middle finger. “So leave me and my poor character alone.”
“The important thing is,” Karube says, interrupting the fight before it can even start. “You don’t want to miss the King of Clubs. It’s going to be so fun.”
“We have something big planned,” Chota adds. “No one else knows that this idiot is still alive.”
Niragi’s answer is resting his hand in the back of Chota’s head and pushing it into the bowl of noodles.
Karube laughs, and Chishiya rolls his eyes and eats his dinner in silence.
It’s surprising how much less annoying his friends are when he has a full stomach.
There are screams coming from Niragi’s room when Chishiya arrives home after his shift at the hospital two days later. If it depended on him, he would just disappear into his room and ignore it, but Kuina is attached to him like a leech, so of course she grabs into Chishiya’s arm and drags him into a room that is not his.
“You are playing it wrong!”
“If I’m playing it wrong, it’s because there’s a loop that allows me to play it wrong!”
“I hate you!”
“I’m helping you, man!”
“What is going on here?”
“Niragi kidnapped Arisu to playtest something,” Tatta says from his place in the bed. Somehow, he’s also there, reading this month's copy of the Shonen Jump next to Usagi. “They’ve been doing that for an hour.”
“And you are here because…”
“There’s a driving section in the game,” Tatta points to the other two. “But they haven’t reached that point yet. I’m being held against my will until Arisu reaches it so I can confirm that the car mechanics are realistic or something.”
“And I was with Arisu when he called,” Usagi is throwing one of Niragi’s stress ball into the air and catching it, bored out of her mind. “And someone needs to know basic first aid stuff in case they start killing each other.”
So this is what everything is about.
Niragi's usual maniac episode before a deadline.
Chishiya has lived through all his college years’ ones. Then the ones during his master. Two of them. And now, it happens with work. Between the two of them, he’s the actual perfectionist. What should be worrying is thinking about Chishiya is becoming a surgeon.
“Then you two can listen to her.” Chishiya pushes Kuina toward the bed where their friends are and turns around to leave. “I’m going to sleep.”
Kuina doesn’t complain. She gives him a noisy kiss on the cheek and throws herself onto the bed, screaming Usagi’s name and giggling.
Lucky for him, Chishiya is a heavy sleeper. Even with the screaming match and the laughs coming from the door in front of his, he falls asleep the moment he hits the bed.
He wakes up from his nap a few hours later but chooses to stay in bed with some background music. He still needs a few minutes for himself after spending the day surrounded by people at the hospital.
Chishiya doesn’t notice when his friends leave.
He’s actually grateful for that. They know him well enough to leave him alone when he needs time to himself after a long day. Kuina is the only one who knocks on his door, she knows that Chishiya won’t open it, so that’s just a small way to say goodbye. Three quick knocks and then the sound of a door slamming shut. It actually makes him smile from his place in bed.
The day was tiring, but Kuina's presence always makes it better, even if he still denies after years that the woman is his first and best friend. She picked him up from the hospital today so she could walk Chishiya home and tell him about her day and how her mom is getting better and all the things they don’t have time to talk about when Chishiya is working. He’s so glad about how well his friend reads him, how she has learned to deal with Chishiya's picky attitude.
But well, a woman who managed to tame and control Niragi and has him hocked on her arm every sale season can actually achieve everything. She was the one rooming them together when they were eighteen, so it makes sense that she’s the only one who knows how to deal with both of them.
Talking about Niragi and Kuina, as much as he wishes the other banished from earth, Kuina would have his ass if he allows him to get sick again. It wouldn’t be the first time a deadline turned into a sleep- and food-deprived Niragi giving everyone a scare, and, even if it was fully his fault for not taking care of himself, Kuina would always get mad at him for ‘not taking care of poor Niragi.’
So he gets out of bed and walks towards his mortal enemy.
The kitchen.
Last time, Chishiya had barged into Niragi’s room demanding that it was his turn to make dinner just to fine him down with a fever and passed out over his computer. He only wanted Niragi to cook something for him, and all he had gotten was a trip to the ER.
Chishiya won’t have that happening again, not because he cares about Niragi, but because he would rather die than spend even more time at his workplace.
Since his skills in the kitchen are not the best, he just grabs some bread, throws whatever they have lying inside the fridge inside, and puts it onto a plate.
Two perfect sandwiches, nothing to envy in Niragi’s cooking.
When he opens the door, Niragi doesn’t flinch. He’s wearing his headphones and sitting like a shrimp in a way that makes Chishiya’s back hurt.
“Eat,” he says, dropping the plate on the table. “You stink.”
Niragi rolls his eyes but grabs the sandwich and gives it a bite without looking away from the screen. Behind his thick glasses, his eyes are red-rimmed and glassy.
“Then leave.” From the corner of his eye, he can see Chishiya sitting in his bed in the spot Usagi, Tatta, and Kuina occupied a few hours’ sooner. He wishes it was still them, the ones keeping him company, and not Chishiya.
“I was talking to Morgana,” the small ball of black fur has made her way into Chishiya’s lap. “But if you feel alluded, maybe you should take a shower. When was the last time you washed your binder?”
He makes an eww sound, and Niragi throws the stress ball at his face with deadly precision. It hits him in the forehead.
“So mature,” Chishiya tries to throw the ball right back at him, but he fails miserably. Instead, he focuses on his own dinner and tries to keep it away from Morgana. “How long have you been there?”
“What time is it is?”
“10:30,” Chishiya says after checking his phone. “How long have you been itting there?”
“Long enough I haven’t felt my leg for a while,” Niragi eats his sandwich, cleans his hands against his pants, and turns his chair around to face Chishiya. “You didn’t burn the kitchen.”
“Even I will be surprised if I manage to burn the kitchen by making a sandwich that I didn’t even bother to heat up,” and, before Niragi can react, Chishiya moves to shove him out of the chair. “Oops.”
Chishiya stands there with his hands in his pockets as Niragi screams bloody murder and tries to stand, just to fall face first into the floor because both his legs are indeed, asleep.
“Start running,” he says, poison dropping from his mouth. “Run!”
“I don’t run,” Chishiya says, walking out of the room, Morgana at his heel. “I think you needed to stretch your legs. Goodnight!”
The stress ball hits the back of his head again, and Chishiya takes one of his hands out so he can give Niragi the middle finger before closing the door behind him.
He can hear him trying to stand and cursing behind it, and Chishiya finds himself smiling.
That was fun.
Sometimes, Niragi is not so bad to be around.