Chapter Text
Atsumu doesn’t hate Mondays, which by all accounts makes him a madman in the eyes of his coworkers – or well, at least in the eyes of Inunaki; everyone else has the decency to not voice all of their thoughts. In his defense, Atsumu doesn’t hate Mondays because he doesn’t hate going to work, donning a lab coat and getting chemistry done – according to, once again, Inunaki, that’s precisely what a madman would say.
Today, Atsumu has to concur – he must be batshit crazy for liking both Mondays and being a PhD student.
“Bokkun,” Atsumu growls as he stomps into the office, “if it was ya who forgot to close the argon in the fume hood again over the weekend, I will skin ya alive.”
“Mornin’, Tsum-Tsum!” Bokuto chirps, like he hasn’t just been threatened to be turned into human skewers. “You’ve got the wrong person, though – I wrote a note to myself to check the argon tap before leaving the lab! It was Akaashi’s idea, isn’t it great?”
“Marvelous,” Atsumu grumbles, falling into his chair and flipping his laptop open. “Well, if ya happen to find out who is responsible, lemme know because I wanna hand them over to Samu – he’s been practicin’ his knife skills recently.”
“Did the bottle run empty again?”
“Not only did it run empty. The gloves on the glovebox were fully deflated when I entered the lab this morning, and the screen was balrin’ red with alarms.”
“Oh-uh.”
“I swear my heart stopped for a moment. Foster might’ve heard me curse.” Atsumu clicks through his emails – LinkdIn has been hard at work again, spamming him over the weekend and telling him how well his profile is doing, as if Atsumu doesn’t know that his latest paper has been generating clicks for a journal which, only one week after his submission, decided to reach a non-agreement on open access with their institute. There’s another email from the electron microscopy department on the SEM being still out of order, the weekly university newsletter, and some more workshop opportunities.
“Anyway, I am regeneratin’ the catalyst now, so I’ll send an email ‘round to let everyone know that the glovebox will be out of order until lunchtime.”
Bokuto places a cup of coffee on his desk and peeks over his shoulder at his screen. “Are your precursors fine?”
“I hope so,” Atsumu sighs. “They’re in sealed vials in the freezer, but I reaaaaally don’t want to spend another two weeks synthesizin’ them. It’s a pain, and then I’ll have to compare two different batches and the reproducibility of the data will be buggin’ me.”
“Man, this sucks,” Bokuto pats his shoulder, finally sounding appropriately distressed for this particular Monday morning.
Just as Atsumu presses send on the email, a new one pops in his inbox. It’s from Meian, and the subject reads New PhD today.
“Ah yeah, the new guy is starting today. Yer gonna have a same-supervisor buddy, Tsum-Tsum!”
“More like a menace,” Atsumu mutters as he skims through the email. “Sakusa was antisocial in undergrad and I’m sure he’s gonna keep bein’ a pain in the butt now.”
“He’s the one you shared your valedictorian spot with, isn’t he?”
Sakusa Kiyoomi is more than the guy Atsumu shared his valedictorian spot with – that was one stage, for five minutes and ten different photos. The fact that Sakusa isn’t smiling in any of them isn’t why he was a thorn in Atsumu’s side for five years – no, that is courtesy of Sakusa and Atsumu ending up in the same lab one too many times and Sakusa never sharing his time or his substances.
This one time, Atsumu’s lab partner, gifted with two unnaturaly large left feet and terrible eye-hand coordination – which is an equally terrible fit for both sports and lab work –, managed to trip and break their flask of dicyclopentadiene. The fact that he wasn’t hurt was the only lucky event of the day. Everyone had to evacuate the lab because of the smell, so Atsumu was left with half a day, no dicyclopentadiene and a raging headache from the smell (and the suppressed desire to rip his lab partner a new one). Sakusa gave him the nasty eye when they left lab – like Atsumu had a remote controller for his lab partner’s feet and just didn’t know how to use it, or something – and then again when Atsumu had to step on his pride and ask Sakusa for any leftover dicyclopentadiene to finish his experiment. The nasty side eye Sakusa gave him during the lab evacuation was nothing compared to the absolute disdain contracted in every muscle of his face when he said, “I only made enough for two.”
Six words have never chipped at Atsumu’s pride so deeply – not until Sakusa struck again at the end of the following semester, when he randomly texted Atsumu, “how did you do in the inorganic chem exam?”
Atsumu scrolled up their conversation – the screen would not move, because there was no previous conversation. The first text Sakusa ever sent Atsumu was two years into their bachelors and it read how did you do in the inorganic chem exam? with absolutely zero preamble. The only reason Atsumu even had Sakusa’s number saved was because he considered sending a very angry message after the dicyclopentadiene incident, and only Osamu prying his phone out of his hands and replacing it with a fatty tuna onigiri prevented that message from seeing the light of the day.
It sucked, Atsumu typed back, because their entire cohort walked out of that exam with a desire to find out their professor’s address, either to have words or to send angry letters which would have a lot more words . The only conceivable reason for Sakusa to text Atsumu would be to ask for the address – which Atsumu sadly did not have, else their professor would already be in possession of an even angrier message than the one which never reached Sakusa. The questions were so weird.
Really? Sakusa texted him back, like this was news to him. I thought it was fine.
Atsumu waited for the punchline.
Five minutes later, Atsumu realized there was no punchline. That was the end of the conversation. Sakusa texted him just to brag about having done well on the inorganics exam, then pissed off to make enough dicyclopentadiene for just two.
Atsumu cannot be blamed for not standing the guy’s guts.
“How he passed the HR interview is a mystery,” Atsumu tells Bokuto, taking a sip from the coffee. In true Bokuto fashion, almost half of it is milk.
Atsumu cannot have good things today, it seems.
🧪🧪🧪
When it rains, it pours, but the weather forecast had the gall to call today sunny.
“Good work,” Meian says, scrolling through Atsumu’s manuscript. “Let’s send this to the other authors to get their input.”
Atsumu sighs, and with it a month’s worth of back and forth on the figures, structure and depth of his discussion leaves him. “I think I need to go for a hike after all the time I’ve spent with my eyes glued to the screen.”
“Sure,” Meian laughs. “You should take some time off. But first – Foster-san asked me to go to this meeting in his stead, so could you pick up Sakusa-kun from his introduction event?”
Atsumu wonders if the disgust on his face is that obvious, because Foster pats his shoulder. “I’m not asking you to show him around. Just pick him up and bring him to the office, hmm? He’ll have enough logistics to deal with to keep him busy for an entire week.”
“Only for ya, Meian-san,” Atsumu sighs again, and this time, he breathes in all the annoyance which comes with dealing with Sakusa.
“Thank you, Atsumu-kun.”
“4pm?”
“Yes, in front of the auditorium.”
“Got it.”
Atsumu only gets through the rest of the day on the promise of leaving work early, right after he picks up one freshly out of an industry internship Sakusa Kiyoomi. Part of him wonders why hotshot I aced the inorganic chem exam which the entire cohor flunked Sakusa returned to academia instead of sticking to the industry. Atsumu is pursuing an academic PhD because he wants to teach one day – always has, always will, no matter how many people forget their argon taps open or break his schlenk line, because the look in his students’ eyes when they get a concept, when chemistry hooks them in, is priceless.
Sakusa likes to brag about his grades and doesn’t like to share his dicyclopentadiene, so really, Atsumu pities his students.
4pm rolls around after Atsumu has had a proper lunch and coffee and feels somewhat more human again. He makes it to the auditorium five minutes early, because he doesn’t want to give Sakusa the satisfaction of criticising Atsumu for being late, and watches the people slowly trickling out.
Atsumu’s not exactly sure what he was expecting – Sakusa wouldn’t bleach his hair or pierce his ears even if he was held at gunpoint, but it’s been a whole year since Atsumu last saw him, so he was expecting… something. Some change. Some minute detail to distinguish this Sakusa from the asshole who glared at me if I sat any closer than two chairs away from him.
Instead, Sakusa looks disarmingly familiar. He’s wearing a black face mask, his curls are perfectly styled despite the humidity, and there’s not a crinkle in his shirt. Everything about him screams asshole ; everything inside Atsumu screams run away.
“Miya,” Sakusa nods, stopping a respectful half a meter away from Atsumu.
“Ya don’t sound too surprised.”
“Meian-san told me in advance.” Sakusa’s eyes must have a built-in scanner function, because Atsumu feels properly micro-analyzed as Sakusa looks at him from head to toe. “You haven’t changed.”
“I didn’t need to.”
Atsumu is ninety percent sure that Sakusa sneers under his mask. For the sake of his blood pressure, he chooses to willfully ignore that.
“Anyway, follow me. We’re gonna walk in a straight line, then turn left, and then ya can be buried in yer laptop as much as ya want for the next four years.”
Sakusa doesn’t say anything for the rest of the grand five minute walk to the office building. It makes Atsumu squirmish – he doesn’t want to be caught sneaking glances at Sakusa’s face, trying to read something ( anything , really) from the guy because, well, he hasn’t seen Sakusa in an entire year and the last time they saw each other, Sakusa got the price for the best master thesis and Atsumu quietly fumed in his seat. Then, instead of taking one of the three PhD offers he got, Sakusa fucked off to the industry and Atsumu had to seat through another round of professors bemoaning losing Sakusa and how that was such a shame, like they didn’t have Atsumu, certified valedictorian and with three papers published during his masters alone, teaching their damned lab courses. Sometime at the end of his first year, Atsumu started envying Sakusa for being smart enough to not voluntarily choose becoming the unpaid TA of their former professors by signing the PhD contract. The fine print was written in invisible ink and required you to commute twice a week to teach twenty uninterested biology undergrads who thought the gummy ring went onto the Büchner funnel like some fancy decoration of sorts.
And then, one year later, Sakusa – who had turned down three PhD offers – submitted his application to Foster, who had never been one of the three profs to beg Sakusa to stay in academia. He went through the interviews and got his place fair and square, and was going to sit in the same office, right across from Atsumu, for the next four years.
Despite choosing this – despite seeing Atsumu’s face on the group’s website, listed under Meian’s project as the only PhD student –, Sakusa chooses to mark the beginning of the next four years by walking next to Atsumu in tense silence for five minutes.
It’s only as Atsumu pushes the office building’s door open that Sakusa finds it appropriate to say, “I look forward to working with you for the next few years.”
“Do ya now,” Atsumu mutters under his breath. They were so close to the finish line – suddenly, he missed the silence.
Even with the mask on, Sakusa’s eyebrows do impressive work in conveying his feelings. No wonder he and Motoya are cousins. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Usually, people who look forward to workin’ with me show it better.”
“By stroking your massive ego?”
“By not being dicks,” Atsumu snaps, right as he steps into the office. Does that count as clearing the finish line? “Anyway, yer desk is there,” he points, “Meian-san’s in the office next over but he’s in a meeting right now, and I am going home. ”
Atsumu is grateful to his past self for having packed already. All he has to do is swing his backpack over his shoulder – dramatically, as Osamu would insist to add – and stop in the doorframe to shoot Sakusa one last look. “If you fuck up the glovebox, too, I will skin ya alive.”
There must be at least a thousand parallel universes and alternate timelines out there. In this one, Sakusa stares dumbfoundedly as Atsumu leaves the office early, with a smirk and the faint scent of victory in his trail.