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Yamaguchi’s sick, upstairs, unconscious, so Kei is alone in the kitchen when unexpectedly, Yamaguchi’s mom comes home early.
“Did you make that?” she asks. Kei would’ve snorted if it wasn’t rude. He’s terrible in the kitchen, and she knows this, of course. There’s still a burn mark on their counter, next to the stove, from when he and Yamaguchi had once tried to make strawberry jam — an arguably simple thing to cook.
He settles for shaking his head no instead. “My brother,” he reluctantly admits. “I helped.”
She perks up at this as she deposits her bag by the sofa and rounds the corner to shuck her coat off, coming closer and taking a second look at Kei, in her kitchen, with his freezer bag, as she does so. He knows that Yamaguchi tells her everything, so he isn’t surprised by her follow-up question. ”You’re talking?”
“…yeah,” he grits out. “Not really. Kind of. I talked to him for this.”
“That sounds complicated.”
“I wanted to bring Yamaguchi soup,” he says as succinctly as possible. That’s the least complicated part of it, and it’s true. “So, I had no other choice.”
“That’s nice.” It’s said lightly and noncommittally, an effort to be casual. It’s the same tone Yamaguchi himself takes, when he’s scared that Kei might be feeling skittish. It makes Kei think of Yamaguchi again, his nose blocked, sniffling in his sleep, the last he’d left him.
“…he works himself too hard,” Kei mutters, by way of further explanation. He can’t keep the slight anger out of his voice.
Instead of answering directly, Yamaguchi’s mom lets it sit for a moment as she moves around Kei and deeper into the kitchen. When she eventually speaks, it’s to offer something else.
“He’ll like it if you put it in this bowl,” she suggests, her voice chased by the sound of a heavy drawer rolling open. She’s holding a tacky plastic bowl with her arm outstretched towards him when Kei turns to look. As he takes it, she bumps the drawer shut with the side of her hip and bustles over to a different section of the small kitchen.
It’s a really stupid bowl. It’s one of those kids’ ones, cheap, that you get for free with a purchase of anything else. This one is a WcDonald’s special. It’s an anthropomorphic character of their french fries, with googly eyes and a grin. It has teeth. “Why does it have teeth?” Kei asks aloud.
Yamaguchi’s mom laughs, tinkling. The utensils that she’s rifling through tinkle along with her.
“It’s from his 12th birthday,” she tells Kei, conversationally. “He didn’t really want the kids’ meal, just the large fries, of course. But I think he felt that it was worth it for the bowl.”
Kei thinks of the little french fry charm that’s sitting in his bag. A few weeks ago, Ennoshita announced that Yamaguchi would be the next captain. Even though Kei already knew that this would happen, he’d still felt happy about it. Enough to have seen the keychain swinging on the display at the counter of Sakanoshita. “Yeah,” he says, carefully lifting the thermos of soup out of the insulated bag that he’d brought it in. He’d been too embarrassed to actually ask coach for it. In the end, he’d swiped it, and left the correct amount of coins.
Yamaguchi’s mother hums as she comes over and sets down the soup spoon that she’s retrieved for Kei. “That was his first birthday after meeting you, you know,” she reminisces. There’s something leading in her tone that sets Kei on edge, for some reason. It really shouldn’t. Kei takes his time with the thermos, setting it on the table and unscrewing the cap slowly, so that he can keep his eyes trained downwards.
“Oh,” he answers, neutral, “Was it… fun?”
“Hm,” she says thoughtfully. “It was. He was really happy.”
”That’s good,” Kei lifts the cap and inverts it carefully so that the condensation that’s gathered in the ridges of its side doesn’t pool and splatter onto the countertop. Steam rises from the hot soup within, damps the edges of Kei’s fingertips.
Yamaguchi’s mom has her head tilted as she watches him. When he meets her eyes, she smiles. It’s the same smile he’s known since he’d first met her, and it stretches into knowing curve around her words when she says, “He was really happy because of you.”
”I didn’t even know when his birthday was yet,” Kei mumbles quickly, defensive. He picks up the ladle and lifts the dumb french fry bowl to the lip of the thermos cup.
“He was really happy to have met you,” Yamaguchi’s mom corrects. Like Yamaguchi, Kei’s standoffishness has never bothered her; she’s endlessly patient in the same way, happy to make an amendment to her words. It’s wheedling. It’s tiring. It makes Kei honest.
“I think…” he confesses quietly. “I was the happy one.”
They both watch the soup pour into the cradle of the bowl. The tips of Kei’s ears burn; quite meanly, he imagines the piping hot broth scalding the french fry’s face. When he was younger, he hadn’t liked Yamaguchi’s mom. She was hardly ever around, and when she was, she was tired and frazzled and smelled like antiseptic in a way that Kei didn’t understand; at Kei’s house, Yamaguchi got to eat with him and his mom and his brother at the table, and have meals that were cooked the same night. But now, standing at the same counter as Yamaguchi’s mother, her words knowing and her actions purposeful, Kei finds certain familiarity in the love that she has for Yamaguchi.
“It smells really good,” she offers.
Soft slivers of white meat float in the dark broth; the thin sheen of fat glistens over the top of the soup and reflects the light into Kei’s eyes. He swallows. “He’s… probably my most important person. Besides my family. So.” The last word comes out as barely above a whisper.
They’re both quiet as Kei finishes doling out two more big ladles of soup, until the bowl is filled nearly to the brim. Kei focuses intensely on the task, methodical, steady. Yamaguchi sick upstairs because he’d been working too hard; practicing with Shimada, helping Ennoshita and Tanaka with club stuff, studying really hard for his college prep classes.
“Don’t be too hard on him,” she advises, “He still really wants to catch up to you. Always has.”
”That doesn’t make any sense,” Kei can’t help the displeasure that seeps into his voice, verging on frustration. “He’s been ahead of me for a long time.”
“He’d like to hear that,” she muses, and Kei snaps his mouth shut instantly, embarrassed that he’d said that aloud. She chuckles lightly at his mortification. “For now, I’ll keep it between us, Kei-kun.”
Her expression turns sly, then. Mirthful with a mischievous gleam in her eyes, and Yamaguchi really does look just like her. “I mean, Tsukishima-kun. That’s what it is, these days, right?” She gives him a look of faux innocence that’s instantly recognisable to Kei.
“…Tsukki,” he mutters, after a beat. “He calls me Tsukki.”
She cocks her head. “And you let him?”
Kei looks at her, reproachful. She smirks back, unwavering.
The admission unfurls delicately from his lungs and flutters in the air between them. “Only him.”
It’s awkward, after that. He can’t bring himself to see what she looks like. Instead, he picks up the bowl, gingerly, by its protruding edges — the tips of the fries sticking out, and the very base of the holder. Stupid bowl. Idiot Yamaguchi.
Still… working so hard because he wants to be by Kei’s side. Happy about Kei on his own birthday. Yamaguchi’s not the only idiot, Kei thinks, after he’s padded carefully up a dark flight of stairs, holding a french fry shaped bowl full of hot soup all the way. Hope flutters in his stomach when he knocks gently on the door with his elbow, and again when he lets himself in and sees how the moon has cast its silvery light over Yamaguchi’s sleeping form.
With as much gentleness as he can manage, he sets the soup down on the bedside table.
“Get well soon, Tadashi,” he says softly, before he moves to shake Yamaguchi awake.