Work Text:
It is late afternoon as Sanemi hustles across campus to get to the coffee shop, growling under his breath. He’s sure Shinobu is all in a twist over him being late, as usual. Being paired with a hyper-achiever in his anthro class is sapping his will to live.
He’d taken this class because it was supposed to be easy. But then there had been a last-minute change in the professorial ranks, and now they were stuck with some new PhD grad who thought group projects were a good idea and not one of the nine circles of hell.
He walks into the campus coffee shop to the sound of the milk frother hissing. He looks toward their usual booth, and yup - she’s staring at him with that tight smile and unnerving aura of calm. He ignores her for the moment and walks to the counter.
He gives his order to the girl with cotton-candy pink and green hair, wondering how a person can be so happy over someone ordering a fucking cafe Americano.
Once that’s done, he walks toward the booth, dragging his feet, the espresso grinder going off and drawing his attention.
He spares a look at the barista behind the counter.
Tomioka is the only one back there, as usual. Currently, his back is to the room. He appears to be mixing three different orders, setting one in the blender without looking as he pours milk into two waiting cups. His hair is pulled back, hanging in a dark tangle over his burgundy-colored shirt, the ties of the black apron gathered tight around his trim frame.
Sanemi forces himself to pull his eyes away to look at Shinobu, who is tapping away on her keyboard, the smile on her face as sharp as a blade.
“I wonder what you do with all your spare time, Sanemi-san,” she says in a sing-song tone, as she pokes the keys with the tips of her daggered nails, punctuating the syllables in his name. “How many classes are you taking again? Four, was it? My, how nice it must be to have such a light semester.”
Her smile brightens, and there is a dangerous sparkle in her violet eyes.
Sanemi slides in next to her, putting his bag on the floor. He scowls at her as he says under his breath, “Quit your bitchin’. It ain’t my fault that you’ve overburdened yourself. If you’re having a hard time, you should just drop one of your sixteen damn classes.”
She squints at him, her teeth glinting when her smile widens.
“And get an incomplete? I know you’re not serious. And, Sanemi-san, where would that leave you, I wonder, hmm? I doubt very much that you’d get an A all on your own. Unlike our noncommunicative classmate behind the coffee bar over there,” she chides, arching her brow toward Tomioka.
Sanemi growls at her wordlessly.
It’s all true. But it’s also true that he’d be just fine with doing the bare minimum on the project and getting a C. It’s not as if he chose to be saddled with the academic elites in the class.
Unfortunately, a C isn’t an option for Kochou Shinobu. Nothing less than perfect will suffice.
“Still,” Sanemi mutters, glancing at Tomioka, “What kind of dumbass just decides to do a group project on their own? And hand it in a month early?”
Shinobu blinks at him slowly and seems on the verge of saying something, but before she can, he hears his name.
“Sanemi,” the quiet, serious voice calls, and Sanemi’s head turns sharply in its direction. Tomioka has just placed Sanemi’s cup on the counter.
He’s on his feet before he even decides to move, walking up to the counter at a brisk pace.
Tomioka is still standing there, holding another drink and calling a different name, but Sanemi doesn’t register it. He approaches the counter, reaching for his cup, but staring at Tomioka.
His expression is blank as usual, eyes quickly skimming the drinks waiting on the counter for a few moments before he blinks. He is about to turn away, but he must sense Sanemi looking at him. He pauses, raising his eyes to meet Sanemi’s, and his gaze is like it always is, a smooth expanse of still water.
Sanemi feels his jaw grind. It’s the same every time he’s here! And just like in anthro class. It’s like the guy is looking through him.
Tomioka waits, picking up a marker and clicking its cap. It seems like he expects Sanemi to speak, probably to make some request relating to the drink he is holding, picked up without thinking.
Sanemi feels his ears heat, and suddenly finds himself very interested in the display of snacks next to the register. Their eye contact snaps like a string, and he backs away before turning back to the table.
He doesn’t know if it’s his imagination that he feels like Tomioka’s watching him as he walks away, but he doesn’t look back.
This time, as he approaches, Shinobu is looking at him intensely with keen interest. She doesn’t say anything before he sits down, but once he does she says, “You’re blushing, Sanemi-san. Let’s see what our friend drew on that cup that’s got you so worked up.”
“He ain’t my friend,” Sanemi snaps, but he feels the heat creep further into his face. He pushes his cup toward her, trying to distract her.
She takes it gingerly, like it’s an artifact, turning it around and holding it at eye level so that she can stare at what's on the side.
“It’s a tandem bicycle. But—” she frowns. “It just has one seat.”
“That’s just a regular bike, Shinobu. I thought you were some kind of fuckin’ genius.”
“Shush, Sanemi! Look.” She turns the cup toward him but doesn’t hand it to him, which is irritating, so he has to bend closer to look for himself.
Sanemi sees that it is indeed a tandem bike - drawn in black marker - long, with two sets of pedals. But there is only a single seat.
“Huh,” he says, reaching for the cup. But she pulls it back, setting it on the table and pulling out her phone. She begins taking pictures of it.
“As usual, so articulate, Sanemi-san,” she says with mock sweetness.
Sanemi ignores her, looking up, curious to see if Tomioka notices her doing this, but he doesn’t. He’s back to work, moving smoothly between the work counter and the espresso machine as if he’s on rails, holding four cups at a time and making it look easy.
“How the hell does he have time to draw this stuff? He’s the only one back there,” Sanemi mutters under his breath. “It’s like he’s some kind of damn coffee ninja.”
“He makes more than coffee, Sanemi-san,” Shinobu says as she turns her phone to the side and dips lower to take a few shots from a different angle.
Shinobu drinks nothing but tea - Sanemi knows.
“Coffee is for commoners,” she’d said dryly, “Tea requires a more refined palate.”
Sanemi doesn’t give a fuck what she thinks about drinking coffee.
“Whatever,” Sanemi says, reaching forward and grabbing his cup. “I’m taking it now, okay? I think you’ve documented it e-damn-nough. Anyway, what did you get today?”
Shinobu reaches for her cup, turning it toward him.
Hers doesn’t have a drawing. Instead, it says, “Patience is loud.”
Sanemi snickers.
“What?” Shinobu asks, turning the words toward her again, as always searching for hidden meaning.
“You’re not patient at all.”
She frowns. “I’m more patient than you.”
“That’s definitely true,” Sanemi says, snatching her phone from her hand.
He scrolls backwards through her photos, trying to find the pictures from the last time they were here two days ago.
She slides closer to him in the booth and pokes him hard in the side.
“Quit it! Your nails are sharp!” he hisses.
“Stop scrolling through my business! I made a folder - look! Here!”
She taps the folder and Sanemi sees a wall of cups pop up on the screen.
“Jesus, how long have we been working on this damn project?” he mutters. She settles next to him as he scrolls through.
“It’s been a little over a month,” she says. “We meet three times a week. And I take several shots… So—”
“Yeah, but there are cups here I’ve never seen.” He squints at them, trying to make out the images.
“Well, I don’t just come here with you,” she says quietly, poking him again in the side.
They sit together scrolling through the pictures.
There are many that he’s seen before - a single water droplet with waves inside, a windmill blowing thought bubbles, many crows - the same crow, he thinks, that shows up again and again - wearing different things on its head: a crown, a halo, a cowboy hat.
There are the ones with words: The ocean is patient, circles have no corners, words < oxygen, storms end quietly.
For a long time Sanemi thought everything that Tomioka drew or wrote was just random dumbassery, but then one day his cup said:
Seven sugars is a choice.
When he read it, his eyes had snapped to Tomioka, but thankfully the guy was in the middle of making three drinks at the espresso machine.
Though Sanemi thought he detected a hint of a smile on his lips.
And Sanemi had blushed so furiously he’d had to sit with his back facing the counter.
He comes to the one with the two coffee beans holding hands, and it makes him want to smile, so he scowls instead, and hands Shinobu back the phone.
Then he leans forward and takes a big sip of his coffee.
He can’t deny it - the moron makes a good cup of coffee.
The milk frother hisses again as he looks at Shinobu. She’s clutching her phone close to her face, staring, a crooked smirk on her lips.
Sanemi gets fidgety for some reason, and so he sits up straighter, taking another gulp of coffee.
“Alright, Kochou, enough with the damn pictures.”
“Okay, but just look at this one. What do you think it means?”
Sanemi glances at the picture. Two parallel lines are drawn running around the rim of the cup. He’d received the same drawing once himself when he wasn’t with Shinobu.
“Parallel lines never meet,” she murmurs, tracing one with her fingertip. “Side by side forever, but never touching.”
He shifts uneasily in his seat before reaching down to get his bag.
“How the hell should I know what’s going through his head?” Sanemi says, eyeing Tomioka. “Seems airheaded as hell, to me. Let’s go, Shinobu. I need to get this shit off my damn plate.”
***
Shinobu, surprised by the sudden emergence of Sanemi’s work ethic, lays her phone down on the table and returns to her computer. She eyes him, watching him as he looks at Giyuu.
She often wishes that she had made a similar choice as Giyuu - she would have been far better off without a partner. Especially once she knew that Sanemi was a senior who had already basically checked out. But her sister had always told her it was best to learn to work with others, so she’d stuck with him on principle.
She almost told him to just leave the whole thing to her. What did she care if he’d get an A on the project off of her work? The whole thing would have taken her no longer than a weekend to complete.
But then they’d come here to work on the project and discovered Giyuu and his cups.
Giyuu barely spoke in class - though she’d tried once or twice to make conversation. His responses were succinct to the point of being blunt. And then randomly and without warning, he’d simply turn his head or walk away.
Shinobu didn’t know what to make of it. It was vaguely irritating, and she especially didn’t like that he seemed to think he deserved special treatment when he went ahead and just did the project on his own.
He was very, very perplexing.
However, their silent classmate seemed to have a lot to say on his cups. Over the course of several project meetings in the coffee shop, an intriguing game unfolded between her and Sanemi.
She’d tried to play the game on her own, coming alone several times when it wasn’t her normal mid-afternoon meeting with Sanemi. But she soon discovered that when it was only her, the pictures weren’t the same. They were, in a way, rather mundane. Butterflies and the moon and crows. The only one that was of any interest was the one with the two parallel lines.
So she found it was more fun to play this game of cups with Sanemi, because the clues to the puzzle of Tomioka Giyuu were much more interesting when they were together.
Her eyes flick back to the coffee cup with the tandem bike.
A worrisome thought occurs to her.
“Do you ever come here without me?” she asks nonchalantly.
“I basically live on coffee, Shinobu,” Sanemi says, sighing as he bangs away on his keyboard. She can see that he’s had to have several of the keys replaced.
“What kinds of things does he draw when it’s just you?”
Sanemi shrugs.
“Mostly he draws pictures of food and coffee cups, occasionally crows, but they are just boring regular crows. They don’t wear top hats or have three eyes.”
“Hmm, that’s interesting,” Shinobu says, tapping her lips lightly with her fingertip as she watches Sanemi take another gulp.
He sometimes gets two or three cups while they work. With each new cup, Giyuu’s notes start to read like warning labels:
Caffeine ≠ readiness, blood pressure > stability, shaking not stirring.
She too felt mild concern for her partner, and she asked him once if he was able to sleep after drinking so much coffee.
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” Sanemi had said, scowling at her. “Stop acting like my damn mother.”
She’d laughed lightly, but gave him a look that could cut glass.
She watches him finish his cafe Americano.
“That’s veeery interesting,” Shinobu says, repeating herself.
Sanemi turns to her, knee bouncing. “How so?”
“When I’m alone my pictures are boring, too. And he almost never writes any words. It seems things only get interesting on the cups when we are here together.”
“Huh,” Sanemi says.
She eyes him, amused by his monosyllabic responses, but then, usually he has a lot more to say to her than Giyuu.
That thought makes something heavy drop inside of her.
The espresso grinder whirs, and she turns to look at Giyuu. He’s deftly handling multiple orders.
She stares at his hands as he works, noticing that his hand holding the marker appears relaxed, adept. Clearly this is something he's capable of. Creating with his hands. Perhaps he’s really an artist, just bored and trying to amuse himself? Or maybe the writings and pictures are messages? A way of reaching out without speaking?
Just as in class, she’s rarely heard him speak here except to call their names, though he occasionally exchanges a word or two with the girl he works with. But during those exchanges, she seems to be doing most of the talking.
Focused but blank, his expression gives no hint as to what might be going through his head. He is certainly handsome, but Shinobu longs for more than that. She wants to understand his mind.
She realizes that she’s been staring at his hands while he works for quite a while, and so she forcibly breaks her gaze, smoothing her skirt beneath the table.
When she comes back to herself she realizes she can no longer hear Sanemi typing.
Concerned that perhaps he’s caught her staring, she flicks her gaze in his direction, only to find him staring at his phone.
“I just ordered us another round. I paid, but I put it under your name,” Sanemi says, shooting a look at her with a smirk.
Feeling an odd mix of charm and irritation, she asks, “What did you order for me?”
He scoffs, mock-offended. “What the hell do you think? The same thing you always drink.”
“With extra foam?”
He rolls his eyes, before cracking his knuckles and looking back at his computer screen.
“Like you said - it’s been a month. I know how you like your damn matcha. Thank me when you get our drinks and you can have another little photo shoot.”
“How thoughtful of you, Sanemi-san,” she says, her tone over-sweet. She watches his eyes flick up to look at Giyuu over the top of his computer screen, and she follows his gaze.
Giyuu is holding a cup and drawing. She wonders if it is one of theirs.
Shinobu is vaguely aware of grinding and hissing as she and Sanemi work together in silence for a few minutes, and then Giyuu calls her name.
Something thrills through her, but she masks it as she walks up to get their drinks.
She doesn’t look at the drawings until she’s back in the booth, and Sanemi promptly drops what he’s doing to look at his cup. Her cup has a drawing of two crows on a wire. They seem to be facing one another. One of them has its beak open, as if it is talking to the other crow.
Sanemi’s cup has a single crow flying between two wires.
“The guy definitely likes crows,” he says under his breath.
Shinobu squints, putting their cups side by side. She doesn’t take out her phone. She just stares at them.
Slowly, in a creeping kind of way, something dawns on her.
“Sanemi. What if….” She trails off, her stomach sinking.
He waits a few beats before he says gruffly, “What if what?”
“Well, I wonder - these two crows. What if they are us? What if he thinks… we’re together?”
Sanemi frowns at her for a few moments, before he looks at Giyuu, and his expression deepens into something strange. A look she’s never seen.
She’s used to him being angry and irritated - it’s basically 90% of his personality from what she’s observed. Now he just seems unsettled.
“No. That’s not….” He trails off, and he runs his thumb over the single crow on his cup. He won’t meet her eyes.
Shinobu is about to say something, and that is when she realizes that her throat feels a little tight. She hates that it does.
It seems that perhaps she’s misjudged the game they have been playing. Or at least, what the stakes might be. All sense of fun collapses in that moment.
She pokes him hard in the side.
“Shinazugawa,” she says, her tone breathier than she’d like. “Are we playing a game? Or are we… rivals?”
His eyes cut to her then, and she feels her stomach drop. Because there is no mistaking the look that he gives her.
They both look at Giyuu.
***
The light in the cafe shifts, and I look at the clock. It’s getting late. Almost time for me to leave.
The air smells like espresso, but when the door opens, I catch the scent of rain, too.
It will be nice to walk home in the rain.
Milk hisses and the grinder starts.
I glance at their table. I’ve kept an eye on both of them since they arrived today. I saw Shinobu come in first, like she always does. And then Sanemi arrived after.
Is she early or is he late?
I wonder what it is like to work on a project together. I don’t know why I always seem to end up working alone, but that’s okay. I guess it doesn’t matter as long as the work gets done.
I set down their drinks and call Shinobu’s name, turning back to my work. Five more orders waiting. Three lattes, a London Fog, and a black coffee. I pour the coffee and put it on the counter, then drop two tea bags into hot water and get started on the espresso.
As I steam the milk, I take a look out of the corner of my eye, and sure enough, she’s returned to her seat next to Sanemi, and they are shoulder to shoulder, their heads curved together as they inspect one another’s cups. They seem to like talking about them, which makes me glad.
Many people don’t notice what I draw or write on their cups. Which is okay. I’m not always doing it for them.
Mostly, I draw and write about the day - the weather, things I saw as I walked across campus, symbols from math class, random thoughts I have about life that don’t make any sense, even to me.
Other times, I want to say something and don’t know what it is until I’ve drawn it on the cup.
For Shinobu and Sanemi, I often draw Kanzaburo - a crow I named that I always see on campus.
I like him.
I wonder why he follows me. It’s… odd. But also kind of sweet.
Because we are in the same class this semester, Shinobu and Sanemi are the only ones I draw crows for. I’ve done it with other classmates in the past. It’s like a code. Even though I don’t talk to them in class, I’m still saying something, in a way.
Most of the time, I don’t really mind our one-sided conversation, and anyway, what would I say to them? I wouldn’t want to bother them. They seem complete, just the two of them.
And I’m busy - this job is great. The work is as easy as breathing. Way easier than talking to people.
I do wonder sometimes what they might draw for me. What messages they’d write. I’m curious about other things, too.
Why does Shinobu always wear butterflies? How did Sanemi get his scars?
And also -
Did they meet for the first time in our class, and then fall for one another? Or were they already a couple, and decided to take a class together?
I look at them, wondering what it is like to be part of something. To have someone to talk to and spend time with like that. The thought makes something hollow inside of me get bigger.
I feel a little sick.
The lattes and London Fog are done so I set them on the counter. Call the names. When I get back to the espresso machine, there are three orders waiting.
I have to focus on this. But before I grab more cups, I can’t stop myself from glancing in their direction.
Shinobu is poking him again. And then she says something that makes him look at her. The look he gives her - it’s so intense. I’m not sure what it means, only that it must mean a lot, because her returning look matches it.
My throat constricts a little.
Are they fighting?
Suddenly, they both turn to look at me.
Confused, I hold still.
It’s hard for me to read people, especially when they are looking at me. To have two people focused on me like this is… a lot.
One thing is for sure.
No one, let alone two someones, have ever looked at me like this. And I don’t know what it means.
We’re classmates, but I’m no one to them. So it must be something related to their order.
Still, it seems unlikely that if I swapped their drinks they’d be this upset.
Even though Shinobu’s matcha would be far too bitter for Sanemi’s taste.
I look away, putting the cap on the marker, and setting it down. I need to focus so I don’t mess up anyone else’s drinks.
Triggering the espresso grinder, I grab a few cups and get to work.
Just a little while later, I take off my apron and hang it on the hook, grabbing my hoodie. Momentarily trapped inside the hoodie with the scent of coffee that clings to my clothing and hair, I finally manage to pull it over my head.
I push the door open and a wash of damp, fresh air meets me. I breathe it in.
Just before the door closes behind me, I think I hear someone call my name.
Something in my chest tightens.
But I’m already headed for home.