Work Text:
The air-conditioning of the Musutafu Academy library hummed softly, barely cutting through the lingering heat from the sweltering day. Between Takami and Touya lay an open chemistry textbook, papers scattered around the two like a hurricane had hit them. Touya groaned into his hands, glaring through his fingers at the problem as if it had personally insulted him.
He had absolutely no desire to study chemistry, especially not with Takami. Touya still felt guilty for being so harsh towards the blonde at lunch a few days ago, something he would usually fix by avoiding the victim of his anger like the plague for a while. He repeated a mantra in his head: I shouldn’t feel guilty, I did nothing wrong. It was as effective as fruitlessly shouting into the wind.
Touya was also pretty content with his performance in chemistry either way. In the last test, he had gotten a personal best: a 45%. Touya was content. Enji? Not as much. Asides from giving him an impromptu beatdown, Enji had signed him up to the tutoring service offered by the school. One of those tutors was Keigo Takami, a kid who just wanted a little money so he could hang out with his classmates instead of penny pinching for a mere arcade visit.
So, here he was, slouching against the crooked chair and desperately attempting to understand what he was even looking at in the first place: a molecule, an element, a compound? Touya grumbled, cursing under his breath like a sailor. “This is so stupid. Who cares about fats and oils? My mom does the cooking, or the chef, not me.”
Takami snorted, shaking his head a little, “Silver spoon. Right, and what happens when you’re stuck on some… deserted island with nothing but oil and a chemistry set?”
“When would that ever happen?” Touya questioned, deadpan and already sick of whatever nonsense was written in black ink on his page. He scowled, picking up his pen and making a poor attempt at drawing a benzene ring. Touya was neither an artist nor a chemist. “I’d rather just die.”
Takami sighed, rubbing his temple and muttering as he watched Touya. He cringed internally, suppressing the urge to snatch the pen away as he watched Touya butcher the attempt at a benzene ring. It was an abomination of warped angles and impossible bonds that totally defied any logic of organic chemistry and common sense. He muttered, more to himself, “Tempting outcome…”
Touya whipped his head around to give him a black look, something that made Takami roll his eyes and smile teasingly. Their hands brushed briefly as Takami slipped the pen from his grip, moving along a few pages in his notebook. He began to sketch a diagram, one Touya stared at with growing bewilderment, unsure if he’s ever set eyes on such a thing before or if his brain is simply refusing to process what he’s looking at.
“I’ll start simple,” Takami said, tapping his pen on a part of the diagram, “This is an ester. We covered these in class. You do remember, right?”
“Sure…” Touya said, eyes drifting away with boredom to the far more interesting carpet stains. Takami cleared his throat very obnoxiously, snapping Touya back to focus momentarily. “Yeah. I think I might remember that? The smelly things?”
“Aroma compounds. But you’re close enough. Edible fats and oils are esters. They’re formed by the condensation of glycerol and carboxylic acids.” Takami grabbed a highlighter, circling the carboxylic acids and glycerol in separate colours. If Touya understood a thing that was going on or what he was actually highlighting, he might have been impressed by his organisational skills.
Takami tapped the end of his pen at a part of the molecule he had drawn, trying to draw attention to the functional group. “We call the acids fatty acids. You’ll probably have heard the term before. They can be saturated or unsaturated. You know what that means?”
Touya nodded his head for once, feeling like he could actually follow along for once. “Yeah… I think I remember getting that question right in class…”
It should get on his nerves that someone like Takami is so good at this, but somehow it wasn't. He didn’t even look at the textbook or paper while he explained– he just knew this stuff. His pen glided across the paper, marking clean strokes of writing and underlining key terms on the page in neat, precise lines.
“Now,” Takami started, grabbing a pencil and encircling the bonds, purposely highlighting them. “Oils have lower melting points than fats. Do you know why?”
“Do I seriously look as if I know why?” Touya asked, giving him an impassive look.
Takami ignored him, tapping insistently on the page, “It’s because of the double bonds in the fatty acids. They prevent the molecules from packing super close together because of all the kinks. So there’s weaker intermolecular forces. More double bonds, less forces, lower melting points.”
Touya shifted forward, skimming over the notes. He pulled the textbook closer to himself, and for once, he actually found he could make sense of it all after the verbal explanation. “Huh… So… If there’s less of the double bonds, the molecule won’t go as weird of a shape, so it can fit together with other ones easier? And vice versa?”
“Exactly!” Takami sounded ecstatic that he seemed to understand partially. Their hands brushed lightly as Takami flipped the page. Touya felt it. He felt the electric shock running from his finger across his whole body, making his face feel like a radiator. “And the orangey-brown thing there is bromine solution. If you put an unsaturated substance in, the bromine adds across the double bonds in an addition reaction. It doesn’t really do that with saturated ones. So it will decolourise when there’s an unsaturated molecule, but not a saturated one. Got it?”
Touya was surprised. He reached for his worksheet, reading over a question and realising he actually knew the answer for once. He snatched his pen back from Takami, scribbling down a few answers onto the page with a new found determination. “Yeah. Yeah, I think I get it… I think I actually understand what you’re on about.”
Touya passed him the sheet when he was done, feeling smug and proud of himself as Takami raised his eyebrow, feeling impressed. He smiles, just a little, a small upturn at the corner of his lips as he gets a red pen from his neatly organised pencil case and starts to mark. Touya feels an odd twist in his stomach. It’s probably just hunger. Definitely hunger.
Takami rolled up his sleeves a little, and Touya tried so hard not to stare, but God– those veins were right there, running down his forearms like river maps, branching down to his fingers, flexing every time he moved his fingers to tick the page. Veins like that belonged in some kind of artsy fitness ad, not on the guy sitting directly beside him, casually twirling a pen like he wasn’t committing a crime against Touya’s ability to think straight.
It wasn’t Touya’s fault his eyes kept accidentally drifting down. He was just studying them. Like an athlete appreciating another athlete. He liked girls—soft skin, long lashes, all that. So what if, for some godforsaken reason, the sight of tendons shifting under taut skin makes his brain short-circuit just a little bit? He was just impressed, just understanding the muscle definition, vascularity, whatever. Completely normal. There was nothing to see.
“Good work, Todoroki.” Takami whistled, sliding the piece of paper back to him. Not a single cross on the paper. He had done it right, he had understood the material. “Might get a 46% next time, if you keep this up.”
“Shut up…” Touya grumbled, rolling his eyes and looking away. For once, Touya had actually grasped the concept of a chemistry lesson—an undeniable miracle. But, right now, the chemistry occupying his mind definitely wasn’t happening in a lab.