Work Text:
Tadashi is twelve and can't believe his eyes.
These days, the walks to his Cantonese school are the only ones he knows how to do alone, without bobbing his head up and down and going "mhm, yes, oooh, Tsukki!!" at everything Tsukishima rambles to him about, nodding and nodding until he gets dizzy and Tsukki goes "huh?" at the sudden wobble to his steps. It's a route that's familiar to him, since he'd been walking without his father since the second week he'd been enrolled, and Tsukishima had never showed any interest in tagging along.
Did Tadashi even tell him what the school was? He doesn't remember if he did.
So Tadashi gets to go by himself, and do things he usually forgets to do when walking with Tsukishima that he likes, like counting how many birds are on one electrical tower, or mentally debating if he should get a drink at every single vending machine he passes by.
Tadashi has gone by himself today, like he has been for years. He gets tapped on the back when he's waiting to cross the street, and he almost doesn't notice the pedestrian light has switched to green. He turns around and apologizes reflexively—
Tadashi has to look up.
"Tsukki?"
Tsukishima Kei has a very distinct silhouette, maybe mostly due to his height, but it's in his figure that makes him look like he's been pulled out like taffy, and his short, spikey hair that swoops out in front, and the way he's always doing something with his hands and whatever he's doing with them feels intentional (just like when he's playing volleyball!) Today, he has one of them inside of his purple hoodie's pocket, and the hand he poked Tadashi with is hovering in front of himself.
Tsukishima Kei has a very distinct silhouette, and this one feels wrong—just off by a few shades of color. Is this his Tsukishima?
"Hi, Yamaguchi." He drops his hand and looks away. He walks in front of Tadashi, across the road. He takes a piece of paper out of his pocket.
Tadashi jolts again, because this is not an illusion, but his real life best friend that is walking with him. On the same path to his school. "What are you doing here?! I didn't know you came to this area too! You should've told me! We could have walked until—"
He catches up to him, and Tsukishima is standing on the inner side of the sidewalk, squinting at the paper, hunching over to look at it as well as bringing it up higher to his face. He has a vaguely sour expression on his face, but not the same kind he usually has when something is dumb.
Tadashi gets on his tippy-toes instinctually, before realizing he really didn't need to do that to see the paper is covered to directions, to—
"You're going to my school?!" He did not mean to yell it. He did anyways.
Tsukishima jolts, his eyes are all big and he's half gaping. The sight of Tsukki caught off-guard is not technically new, but it makes a little alert go off in Tadashi's brain.
"This is your school?" Tsukki's voice is shocked and a pitch up from what it usually is. Now that is new.
Tadashi waves his arms around. He probably looks like those wind-up dolls that get cranked to life. "I–that's—This is the class I tell you about! On Wednesdays! When I'm busy!!"
"Oh." Tsukishima makes a motion with his chin for Tadashi to hurry up. This time, he stays slightly behind Tadashi. Tsukishima mumbles, "I told my mom to enroll me for Wednesdays because I thought you were busy on them…"
"But this is great! That means we could be in a class together! I don't know how it'll work, since this year's classes already started—is there a course that starts in winter instead of the summer? Is that one yours? I didn't check all the schedules—but you're smart, Tsukki! I can give you the notes we already took—"
"Shut up."
Tadashi's about to laugh when he realizes the bitterness in it. It's not directed at him. He thinks.
"I don't think we are," he continues. "How are they? The people here, and the, uh. Homework."
Tadashi launches into a hopefully very informational tangent about the specific procedures they go into, and how nobody has anything weird to say to him. Tsukishima repeats certain words under his breath, like he's trying to feel how they fit in his voice.
They end up not having the same classroom, but Tadashi doesn't mind. Tsukishima is across the hall.
—
When they make it down the staircase, after class has gotten out for the day, Tadashi double checks the grammar and that he's usin in his head, before asking Tsukishima, "Doing fine so far?" in Cantonese. There's a new level to it, to talking, now that Tadashi has someone outside of his mom and uncle that understands. Oh, Tsukki making fun of someone to their face is going to be ten times easier and funnier when it's only them two in on the joke—
Tsukishima just blinks, furrows his eyebrows, and responds, "Not sure yet."
"Huh? Did something—" Tadashi doesn't know a better, less vague word—"bad happen already?"
"Nothing," Tsukishima switches back to Japanese. He follows Tadashi on his usual route to the bus. Tadashi wonders what his route was this afternoon, before he realized Tadashi was here too. "I didn't realize you were…"
Tadashi straightens himself slightly, because it feels like a capital-s Statement he has to make, and it's not one he's ever said out loud before. "Only on my mom's side. My dad is Japanese. Are you only learning for fun, or…?"
"My parents are both half."
Tadashi beams, just a little, at the small expansion of the world he knows. "That's so cool, that means you're also half, but, like—in a different way!"
Tadashi forgets to count the birds on the electrical poles, but there are two boys with their worn down backpacks on the 4 o'clock train.
—
"I told my mom about you also being half," Tadashi blurts, when Tsukishima was already having a very not good day. Tsukki hasn't said a word to Akiteru-san for a week, Tsukishima-san told Tadashi when he came by. She apologized to him, because on Tuesday, Tadashi spent the first ten minutes he'd arrived at their volleyball center waiting to see Tsukki walk up to the shoe lockers, so he could talk to him. He hadn't come.
Tsukishima's fiddling with an old night light of his; a turtle with holes in its plastic shell that, when on, projects stars all over the room. Tsukki, like Tadashi, feels better when the space is as small as possible, instead of big and spacious, so, why not make a blanket fort? Maybe they're too old, because they're going to be thirteen this year, but that just means they're the right age to do everything on their own—Tsukishima's mother agrees with that slightly less than Tadashi's.
Tsukishima looks up from his project. Tadashi needs to backtrack, backtrack! Now! "Sorry! I'm so sorry, I should have asked, because, what if you don't—"
"It's okay. Can you clip the first corner to the wall yet?" Tsukishima's bed frame is low to the ground in all regards, but it's pushed into the corner of his room, so they're taping clothespins to three points of Tsukishima's walls, and then clipping the blankets to them. Tadashi does so, and tugs on it to see if it stays.
"It's good your mom was happy about it," Tsukishima says, incredibly unclear if he shares that feeling.
"Yeah, she said she might call your parents, and talk to them about it." Tadashi grabs another clothespin, a piece of tape already torn off and stuck to his elbow, to reinforce that first corner. "She also asked where they're from, because a bunch of different places have Cantonese speakers."
He adds on at the end, "My mom is from Hong Kong."
Tsukishima puts the turtle down, and stands on his bed to get the corner diagonal of the one Tadashi did. It's surprising he doesn't hit his head on the ceiling; by this point, Tadashi thought he was "adult body" tall and not "tall for his age" tall. Maybe he was wrong. "I don't know. My dad is from Miyagi?"
Tadashi looks over at him. Tsukishima's glasses frame his eyes, all big and genuinely uncertain. They wait until they finish construction before speaking again.
Tsukishima flicks the big light off. "This feels better," he navigates himself in the dark until he can flop down into his bed, where Tadashi's already made himself comfortable against the wall.
Now stuck captive between the wall and Tsukishima, Tadashi's plea for mercy is, "Mhmm."
Tsukishima starts naming events which have happened in the time he's been out of it, in chronological order, from the day after Karasuno's match until now. Partway, he realizes the turtle isn't on, and sits up to flick it to life.
"I like having a language to ourselves." Tadashi says, forcing his eyes open at the sight of the colors dancing off of Tsukki's skin, how they shift every time he moves. The entire room is illuminated, but he doesn't care as much about beige-turned-dark-blue walls as he does Tsukishima's facial expressions. The one right now is almost like a lip quiver with slightly furrowed eyebrows. The star freckles make Tadashi feel, just for a second, that they truly are the same.
"I'm sorry if I keep talking about it—" He switches to Cantonese–"It's like we have our own—" wait, no, Tadashi didn't learn this word yet, back to Japanese–"hidden code—" and back to Cantonese: "for each other."
Tsukishima looks at him like he's grown a second head. He looks away. Maybe that really wasn't the right thing to say.
"It's good that you're the one that's like me, Yamaguchi."
"I think so too."
"It would suck if the only person who was like me was Kurihara, or something." Tsukki sticks his tongue out at the idea. To both of their knowledge, Kurihara from class 3 was fully Japanese, but was also fully a loud and boisterous little boy who says things he doesn't mean because he thinks he seems cooler for saying them. They both know that last part for a fact, and have been face-to-face with it multiple times during lunch.
With nothing more than a small plastic tearing noise, multiple clothespins fall at the same time and the blanket drops down onto their faces first, before the rest of it comes down too. Tadashi flails to get it off, and when it is, they lie in bed laughing.
Tsukishima is in better spirits than before.
—
Both Tsukishima's mom and Tadashi's parents let him stay the night, and he and Tsukki overheard their mothers' conversation when they were planning to sneak out to the kitchen to eat whole ice cubes straight from the freezer. Neither of them wanted to be noticed, as much as their mothers didn't want to be heard, but Tadashi could hear his mama's voice constantly spike in volume with awe and the immediate apologies when quieting herself down each time.
He wakes up to an empty room and the bedroom door open.
Even besides the plastic baggie of clothespins they left out, and the quilts they hung up being kicked off to the foot of the bed or sprawled onto the floor, Tsukishima's room looks messier than it was last night. Tsukki is not someone who makes a mess first thing in the morning (Tadashi thinks?) but, whenever it came about, Tadashi's only noticing it now.
When getting out of bed, the balled-up quilt that Tadashi steps on has a lot more give to it than he thought, stepping onto a half-centimeter thick piece of fabric, and Tadashi wobbles at what suddenly slips underneath him. He catches himself before he lands forehead-first into Tsukishima's desk and dies a horrible death.
He lifts up the quilt and shakes it until the perpetrator reveals itself, and out falls one of those cool spiral-binder notebooks that Tadashi wants to buy at their local stationary store but hasn't found a reason to. The cover is a slightly transparent black, and it looks like it hasn't been filled with enough loose-leaf paper to be comfortable to use. There's writing in it.
It falls open onto the floor, with its cover facing up. Then Tadashi's entire body fills with fear that he might've ruined all of the pages of whatever book Tsukki was writing in, and he drops the quilt without a second thought and rushes to pick it up.
Without any rational thought in his brain, and the part of his brain that respects his friend's privacy a second too slow, he flips the book over to see if the pages are fine. Unfortunately, "checking if the pages are fine" means needing to look at the pages.
It's Tsukishima's Cantonese notebook. A small part of Tadashi's brain wracks over why he doesn't just keep it inside his bag, but he takes another look beyond recognizing the jyutping—it's open to lesson one, as Tsukishima labels in the corner of the page, but Tadashi didn't go over these things this year, these are the basics—
Oh. Tsukishima's in the introductory course, is the first realization Tadashi has.
But, no, maybe this is from a previous class he took. The pages aren't dated, maybe his notes just contain the basics as a reference for him in the future, like a reminder! Tsukki would do that! It's a possibility! In another fatal error, Tadashi flips until he finds the last filled in page.
The second realization is, not only is Tsukishima in the introductory course, he's awful at it.
Tsukishima likes writing in a pencil with darker lead than most, and it's one of the cooler things in the list of cool things about his stuff. Here, with the crisp white paper, it only makes it more obvious that almost half of every page is covered in eraser markings upon eraser markings. Sometimes he doesn't bother erasing, when the mistakes stretch three whole lines, and strikes them out instead. Sometimes Tsukishima just switches to writing in Japanese.
Tadashi, in the mean part of his brain he's tried to scrub out as much as he's tried to scrub his freckles out before, thinks about Akiteru. They're more related than Tsukki thinks, his brain tells him. Was it just pride, being unable to be inadequate? Is that it? That he couldn't be seen as–
The other part of Tadashi's brain, which has sat with him like an imaginary friend during school lunches, when the safest option was sitting near the school's dumpsters where no person would bother him, thinks about the way he's been talking to Tsukishima recently. About his own pride:
Like our own hidden code. He's been talking about this a lot, hasn't he? Did he make Tsukki ashamed—
"Yamaguchi? We need to leave in ten–" Tadashi hears the door creak ever so slightly, the gap creating a streak of the hallway's light bleeding in, and he drops the notebook a second time.
It lands on the openable spine, and when he goes to pick it up, a smattering of pages glide all over the floor. Tsukishima opens the door fully with a small alarmed noise, and looks down at Tadashi trying to pick them all up. He does not move from the hallway.
"Sorry, Tsukki." Tadashi says, as he looks through ever more of the pages as he puts them back in, one by one. His hands shake and every time he puts one in, it gets caught weirdly and the paper doesn't go through all of the spirals the first time around. Then he has to pop the binding open again and feed the paper in a second time, and then it falls in with its holes one-down from the ring they're actually supposed to be, and hold on this page is upside down—
Tsukishima doesn't remember his numbers, Tadashi sees, as he looks at the class warmup he did a few weeks back, and sees the character for six transcribed with the prononciation of eight. Japanese and Chinese numbers use the same characters, so it's not like he actually thinks luk is baat, but—
Tadashi looks up to see Tsukishima with his hand out in front of him, standing at an angle to not face him directly. Tadashi gives him the cover of his notebook and all of the loose paper. Tsukishima fixes it by the time they're both needed to be out the door for school.
"I'm sorry," is what Tadashi says again, for the forty-millionth time, halfway down the route they take to their junior high.
"It's fine," Tsukishima replies, for the forty-millionth time. It started sounding like an automatic response about five apologies ago. Then, suddenly, a crack in Tsukishima's impenetrable expression, as the fine line he pressed his mouth into turns wiggly:
"You were gonna find out, anyways."
“Still,” Tadashi says, simultaneously as the pedestrian light tells them to go. Tadashi feels like his own mouth, and vision, and everything, is wobbly. He starts walking, somehow, and Tsukki is never more than a step behind.
He was doing too much, feeling too much about just this small fact—
“It’s not small," Tsukishima reads his thoughts. Tadashi said that out loud? “It’s a big fact. For both of us. You just show it like—” Tsukki does a bunch of big hand motions that Tadashi has never seen him do in his life, “and it’s, uh. Better than me.”
Tadashi opens his mouth, and is immediately shot in the chest with, ”Stop apologizing.”
Then, a mumbled, “I’m sorry I’m not in your class.”
“—What?! Tsukki, you can’t say that!” Tadashi freezes in place and does that massive jolt he never could properly control, like those videos of startled cats (watch this, Ito, just clap next to his ear—) and it takes Tsukishima two seconds to turn on his heels instead of getting too far ahead. Tadashi’s hands ball into fists. “I’m not that good at writing! Or reading without jyutping! Or listening when people are talking too fast, or speaking when it’s—”
“—You’re lying, Yamaguchi—”
“Am not! But um! I can tutor you if you want! So! Stop feeling bad!”
Tsukishima blinks at him. He does this thing where he tilts his head and lean in, like a bird. “What?”
”You don’t like being bad at stuff, and you kind of suck right now,” Tadashi says, with more conviction than he does when he says “excuse me” when someone is blocking his path in a hallway. “No offense, Tsukki, but I think I can help you. So you stop being bad.”
Tsukishima crinkles up his face again. The pedestrian light’s beeping starts speeding up, and he starts walking again. “Tadashi, you’re gonna get hit by a car.”
Ta-da-shi. A small “!” alert pops up above both of their heads, Tadashi thinks. He scuttles up behind Tsukishima without any road casualties. “Sorry, Tsukki!”
They’re changing shoes at the entrance of their junior high, and Tadashi stands up from his bottom row cubby, and the exact moment he reaches his full height is the moment Tsukishima opens his mouth and says, “okay.”
”Okay! Let’s go.”
Tsukishima recalibrates. “I mean,” he pauses, mouth slightly open even before he continues, “okay.”
Tadashi realizes he says it in Cantonese, and beams.
—
Tadashi is fourteen, and he’s graduating from the program this week. Because Kei started in the introductory course, which Tadashi skipped, Kei will only be following suit next year.
It's funny, Tadashi graduates this progam, then they'll both graduate junior high, and then they'll be in senior high, and Tsukki will graduate in the middle of their first year. One by one by one, in a neat order with no big gap between.
They're in Tadashi's room—his new room, because his parents took the opportunity with him changing schools in only a couple months to move. It's not very decorated yet, but the first thing they took out of the boxes for his room, besides his bed-stuff and clothes, was his deep green bean bag that's been growing those small fuzzy balls where people sit.
Kei hasn't been in this room before, but he asked 'when are you putting all your photos up?' before falling backwards onto the too-low bean bag chair, and pulled off his backpack to take out his notebooks and other school supplies.
(Tadashi saw the mint-colored corner of Kei's DS lite when he fished out his pencil case. Does he just bring his console with him for every day of school, or just ones that he knows he'll be hanging out with Tadashi without going home after school? Tadashi makes a plan to make sure they can play together before Tsukki needs to go home.)
They hold their tutoring sessions twice a month now, instead of having them both days of every weekend like when Tadashi first proposed them. They spend a good ten minutes with the actual workbooks that their Cantonese school gives them, before Tadashi pulls out the children's book he found when they went to a street flea market, and Tadashi thought it was the funniest thing ever to use for Kei—it's a book that's twenty stories in one, it's a steal, you need it, idiot!
They pooled their money to get it, and they've gone through that book front-to-back multiple times by now. Kei's gotten adept-enough at reading "ages 4-6" tall tales, Tadashi must commend him. Then after Kei reads a handful out to him, with Tadashi's recent challenge of making him try to read a story as fast as possible without skipping syllables as a way to be more fluid in his sentences (you know the words now, kinda, but you treat one sentence like it's three whole seperate ones!) until Tsukki is all out of breath and they're both breaking out into giggles at how violent Kei starts to sound at the end.
Until, somehow, they're both lying on the floor and the giggles are turning into full laughter, the kind that makes both of their stomaches hurt, and their shirts are half rucked up just from the force of rolling around and flopping on the floor and then sitting up again.
Kei's glasses are skewed. Tadashi looks over and fixes them for him. His hands brush against the small tufts of hair right above Kei's ears—Kei cut his hair recently, but it's already reached the point that it looks a little messy and the tiny spike locks all sprout in their own direction, like the tiniest mane a lion could have.
Kei's eyes look unfocused, but he realizes that's because Tadashi just left the grimiest thumb print onto one of the lenses, and Tadashi can't help breaking into laughter a second time as Tsukki gets all pouty rummaging for his glasses case. Kei isn't actually upset, Tadashi can tell from how his eyes look.
Tutoring is done for the day.
—
Tadashi's new room is halfway into "being broken into," as his dad calls it. The space is halfway to being his, he means. The posters, and his jacket hung on the back of the door, the calendar showing it's the same month as the end of school, and the dark blue fluffy rug in front of his mirror all help, but Kei helps the most.
Kei is sitting with his back against Tadashi's wardrobe, laptop resting on his thighs, mindlessly clicking the touchpad over and over. Tadashi's sitting on his desk chair, but he's swiveled it around to be facing where Tsukki is, and he's lowered the seat as much as possible for him to not be eons away from Kei.
They both have a project for social studies—all of their other classes finals are exams, why does this one have to be a project?—where they're supposed to look at international issues and present one, and relate it back to the last unit they learned. It is not a group project, but he and Kei have been talking about it like it is. This basically is a group project, because of how much of it they'll be working on it together-but-alone. Everything they do together is a group activity if they can will it.
Tadashi decided he wanted to do his project on the transfer of Hong Kong back to China's posession, which he keeps wondering if it's too complicated of a topic to do, with too much history for a supposedly five-to-eight minute presentation, and everyone else in their class has actually picked like, a recent thunderstorm in America, or something.
"Tadashi?" Kei asks, barely looking up as he speaks. They made a pack to call each other their by their family names once they get to Karasuno, but all bets are off for when they're alone. Tadashi decided he'll savor these moments, just a little. For no reason at all.
(He has a history project to get to, he can wonder about what his intentions are with his best friend later.)
However, Tadashi has one thing he'll confidently say he likes being able to say: "Yeah, Tsukki?"
"Do you think the font is too small? Our class's projector kinda sucks."
Tadashi leans in on his very weak swivel chair and almost falls, but he yelps and catches himself before he falls onto Kei and crushes his laptop. "It's good, I think."
Kei looks to Tadashi's screen, laptop screen open as far as it can be. "Are you still figuring out your prompt?"
"Yeah. Am I doing too much? How long are our presentations supposed to be again?"
Kei has the packet with all of the instructions on hand, and holds it up for Tadashi to take. "I.. don't think you are. It's an excuse to look at a place you like, even if that means you're looking at news articles about it only."
Tadashi can read Kei's expression to mean he's only pausing to phrase his thoughts in his head, and not because he's out of any. Kei shrugs and looks up at him with a matter-of-fact expression twinging his face, his golden eyes. "If you're that concerned, you could do something about a smaller part related to that whole thing. Like, no need to do all of the work about every single historical moment of Hong Kong, but just focus on the return? Because that's how you've been phrasing it."
"Woah. You're right." Tadashi turns back to his own laptop and taps the touchpad to bring the screen back to life. "I should focus my research. Clarity, like Sogawa-sensei says."
"That's not what clarity means. You mean brevity."
"Shoot. Was I close?"
Kei blinks at him, thinking, before looking back down to google something. "Yeah, I'll give you it."
"Awesome." Tadashi follows his gaze, and, wait… "Did you also pick yours, finally?"
Kei freezes in place. "Uh," he says, like the sound fell out of his mouth against his will. He intertwines his fingers together in his lap. "I'm doing mine on a protest in Guangdong," he sounds like a very strong attempt at being casual.
Tadashi's mom, when he was thirteen and eating lunch on the weekend, and she was getting off of the phone from the Tsukishima household to let Kei come over for tutoring, had excitedly told Tadashi: "Tsukishima-kun's mom just told me, his grandma is from Guangdong. So, you're teaching him the wrong kind of Cantonese, but they said they'll let it slide. They think you're very smart for doing this for him."
A few weeks later, Kei himself had told Tadashi that same information, and Tadashi was just as excited as he was the first time around, now that he knows that Kei knew that answer too.
Those puzzle pieces fit together in his brain, at the syllables of the name, and his best response he can muster that isn't, Holy shit, are you doing this for me? Which would be sick, but it also would feel really good if you were doing this for yourself actually— turns out to be, "Oh, sick!"
Kei has somehow slipped back into his normal form, the version of him that doesn't feel raw and mushy and a little bit like a deer in headlights, and he huffs. "Yeah, because what are the reactions going to be if I did my presentation normally, and then I switched into pronouncing names perfectly every time they came up, and then went back to my normal voice?"
Neither Tadashi or Kei ever say anything about their ethnicities at school, but Tadashi's is mainly due to nobody asking—and, frankly, he's very glad that nobody has. Even with freckles, and a horrible case of acne in the worst crooks of his face (who said they could appear behind his earlobe?), at least this is one thing he can talk about on his own time, without massive arrows pointing it out for him.
Kei has a very different case, where he does not want to talk about it—not to people who don't deserve to know, and, also, he doesn't feel different enough to talk about it to people who think it's cool and fascinating and "what's that like?"
…There's also a general assumption where most kids in their class think Kei might be partially Caucasian. Kei doesn't like it very much. ("I don't think I look that out of place. I'm not allowed to be both tall and blond, that's just too many things to be. I have to be something else.")
But Tadashi gets it. And he knows, at this moment, Tsukki picking this topic for his project is a joke that only Tadashi is in on, and he gets to say something about himself, and be completely under the radar while the rest of the class will think it's a gag.
"Okay, one: I really hope you won't get called racist by the teacher, just because you're doing a voice for it."
"Then I'll pull the minority card on them. It's my sympathy move. They'll never see it coming."
"Two: you have too much of an accent speaking Cantonese for you to say it perfectly."
Kei does not respond.
"Tsukki." Tadashi takes his laptop off his lap and puts it on his desk, then turning to lean forward with his head resting on his propped up arm. "Say Guangdong again."
"… Guangdong." There's a small pause, before Kei unfurls his hands and covers his face with them. "Damn it."
Tadashi laughs like he always has, and quickly goes back to his laptop to find a video on how it's supposed to be pronounced. They rewatch it a milion times over.
When it comes time for the actual presentation, Kei does not sound entirely natural to Tadashi's ears, but nobody else in their class has the experience of listening to their mother speak in another language, so their classmates ripple with the exact reaction Kei wanted.
Tadashi decides to do him one better, and when he raises his hand to ask a question, he does the exact same gag back at him.
—
Tadashi is fifteen and he thinks he'll be pretty okay for his end-of-term exams. Sure, he kind of sucks at English, but he's packed his schedule with study sessions with Kei after club, and with Yachi on saturdays. Kei graduated the Cantonese program a few months ago, so both of their schedules have been freed up to hang out as many days as possible.
Unfortunately, two of his friends don't seem to have the luxury of feeling okay about exams.
Hinata makes an incomprehensible grumble shout, grabbing his hair with both hands and throwing his head back, like a winding up motion before he snaps back down to being almost nose-to-nose to the book on the low table in Kei's room. "But I thought it said so! In the text! Look!"
"No?" Kei asks, incredulously. He holds the book open with one hand and points to the line with another. "It says 'and then,' which does not mean at the same time. Who said they were at the same time, Hinata?"
"And then," Kageyama repeats. He looks down at his own notebook, then at the simple sentence.
They're reviewing a small passage in Kageyama's English textbook (Hinata has the same curriculum as him, which works out in their favor) that's a conversation between a group of four people—which, for immersion, Tadashi recomended they all assign each other one person in the text. Hinata was Mary.
Tadashi's not that good at English either—but he remembers he's in an advanced class with Tsukki, where each subject is faster paced, they can fit two units in the span of time that the regular classes do one. English is a lot easier when you're not asked to also interpret context and subtext, which is apparently only a thing in advanced classes. Hinata and Kageyama are spared.
"It's easier to think about if you imagine it, instead of just reading the words," Tadashi pipes up, "if Mary says she's doing chores, can she go to the party at the same time as she's doing them?"
Hinata looks down at the page while Kageyama stares at him unblinkingly, eyebrows slightly furrowed.
Kei interjects, "No clones, or other weird magic stuff. I can see it on your face. Don't make stuff up if it isn't on the page; you two aren't at that level yet."
Both of them, at the same time: "What's that supposed to mean?!"
Tadashi needs to play the messenger, or middleman, or negotiator between two vastly different islands in Kei's room. "Okay, okay. What's the next question… 'Where did Austin go?'" He looks up and over to Kei, "Austin, can you tell us where you went?"
"America, apparently." Kei shrugs.
"How do you always have the answer so fast…" Hinata mopes. There's something like awe in his voice, as much as it is begrudged.
"I think," Kei adds something to his voice to make it the most infuriatingly polite he can, "if you actually knew how to read what you've given, it's a lot easier to know what's going on."
"I don't want to be here either, asshole," Kageyama is going to throttle Kei, and Kei puts his hands up in front of himself in mock defense.
Tadashi doesn't know how Kei feels about Kageyama, yet, really. Tsukki wouldn't have ever let them into his house if he harbored real discontent for either of them, but he's also always been the one who made every single friendship or enemy he's had with another kid his age seem one-sided. He's somehow mastered being incredibly neutral yet amused about people, and the person on the receiving end can feel however they want about it.
Tadashi doesn't really know where he fits into it besides being other than that.
"If it's the first thing a character says, it'll be stupid to forget it, because that's how you learn of their existence. You two would rather be, 'meet Hinata and Kageyama for the first time, from Karasuno volleyball club,' and not 'meet Hinata and Kageyama, who got kicked out of the gym—"
"We get it!!!"
Tadashi tugs on the side of Kei's sweater and Tsukki freezes up for a second, slowly turning his head to look. Tadashi points up to the clock on the wall, by his closet with the door not closed right. It's far after when those two were supposed to leave.
Kei stares like that shouldn't be possible, then goes to shut the textbooks and slide them back to Kageyama. "Okay, we're done for today. Get out."
"AH? Already? But, we're not done—" Hinata looks down and realizes that the question about Austin was, in fact, the last question for that passage. He looks back up at Tadashi instead of Kei, for some reason. "Can we do this again? Another time?"
"Oh?" Tadashi exchanges a glance with Kei, then decides, like the good samaritan people seem to assume he is whenever he's next to Tsukki, "Yeah, sure. I think we can fit in another session."
Tadashi elbows Kei like it's punctuation for what he's saying, "Right?"
"Mm." Kei shrugs, with a nearly shit-eating grin that Tadashi's learned to recognize. "If these two really need it."
Hinata leans in towards Kageyama, saying "just make this easier for us" in the loudest whisper
Tadashi's ever heard.
Kageyama mumbles, "We'll take it… if it's okay with you."
"Jeez, sure." Kei rolls his eyes in the most exaggerated way possible, while helping Hinata pack up his homework sheets at the same time. He shoots a small glance at Tadashi—he thinks, it was so brief, maybe Tadashi imagined it. When did Tadashi get to the point of imagining looks?—and says, "I don't understand how hard it could possibly be, to just learn another language."
Tadashi almost laughs then and there, as the other two gawk at him. Instead, once everyone's stuff has been moved off the low table, he helps Kei fold it up so it can go into the gap between his bed and his closet, and Tadashi raises an eyebrow at him when his back is facing Hinata and Kageyama.
Tsukki returns it with an intentionally blank stare, like he's naive to the world, and didn't only say that because he knew Tadashi knows he's being a hypocrite, and wanted to give him something to laugh about. Tsukki said it because he knew it would be a joke shared just between the two of them, and Hinata and Kageyama entirely oblivious.
Somehow, the two don't complain that much as they need to pack up. More than anything (and though Kageyama is much more quiet about it), they thank Tadashi and Kei for being willing to do this for them, because they have to go to the training camp, no matter what. Hinata remembers to turn back and say thank you to Tsukishima-san, for her hospitality and for letting them stay so late, and Kageyama jolts and thanks her as well, though only half-shouting from the genkan, because he already had his shoes on and didn't want to take them off again.
Tsukishima-san laughs and tells Kei to walk them to the road, and he grumbles as if he wouldn't do that regardless.
It's only after Hinata gets on his bike and rides away, and Kageyama heads off in the other direction, that something weird settles in Tadashi's chest. The fact that it's just the two of them alone means nothing at all, because "just the two of them" is their usual state of being, but it feels like something's washing over Tadashi, bolding and underlining the fact that something meant to be a group of four has gone down to just two.
That's a lot to be feeling at a moment, so instead, Tadashi looks out into the road and says, "Do you think we're actually helping them?"
"Who knows what gets through those thick skulls of theirs."
Tadashi snickers, and, in line with what they were talking about earlier, decides to muster up what Cantonese could come to mind at the moment; he still speaks to his mom using it, but it's different when he's agreeing to wash the dishes instead of actually applying it in homework—Nonetheless, his brain is half fried after being out of his house, around other people who aren't Tsukki, for far more hours than he usualy does. "You're… not going to tell them anytime soon?—" then, back to Japanese, "—Right?"
Kei nods, in Japanese: "I think so."
"Yeah, okay. Um. Like before, I won't say anything until you're ready." Tadashi faintly realizes they're both just standing on the steps of Kei's house, but he doesn't know if he could do that. Taking the first step back across the threshold feels like something with more meaning than it's supposed to have. So, he continues speaking, "With those two, I don't think there's much of a chance they'll find out prematurely. Not even sure if they could even consider you were half-white, I think they'd jump to you being a fae that was swapped with a human baby."
Kei laughs, wholeheartedly though not loud—like it escaped from him against his will and he kept going with it regardless—and Tadashi feels as if sound could run down his spine. His eyebrows are slightly pinched, and Kei swallows before suddenly saying, in Cantonese, "they're in my fridge."
"HUH?" Tadashi almost keels over from cackling, before hitting him on the shoulder. "Tsukki, what—how—why?!"
"I don't know how to swear in Canto, Tadashi! I'm using what I have!" Kei waves his hands around, which Tadashi knows he adopted it from him. "My other option is beat them to death, but I'm using that as a replacement of 'fuck them!' If I put them in my fridge that means they're dumbasses!"
Tadashi registers it like Kei is teaching him an actual idiom, "Okay, okay, got it. So, now we can cuss them out without them knowing?"
"I mean, if they're not paying enough attention to realize we're speaking a different language, then it's anyone's game."
"They'll probably think you picked it up as a hobby, because of how intellectual you are, so, yeah. Anyone's game."
They laugh a little, again, but then the jokes fall away, and it's back to just them with nothing else to hide behind. Kei's hands fiddle with a string poking out of his sweater without him looking at it. His eyes are trained on Tadashi. Tadashi feels like, if he blinks, this moment will suddenly dissappear.
Tadashi, on auto-pilot, decides to step towards Kei, instead of into his house. He has a weird thought about messing with that thread on Kei's sleeve for him, and maybe their hands will brush, which is something entirely normal that's happened before (and they've roughhoused beyond weird brushing, and Tadashi's used Kei as a place to stick his chewed gum onto before, which usually lead to aforementioned roughhousing), but Tadashi's hands suddenly feel clammy thinking of it now.
Having a crush on your best friend makes you stupid, and it's the worst symptom, because it hits in the middle of moments when you forget that you're in love with them.
Very suddenly, Tadashi is not comfortable with doing the best-friend-isms he was doing three minutes ago. Which sucks actually, because Tadashi was ready to spend the night here, but he thinks he might explode from that idea.
A small one-syllable noise falls out of his mouth at the same time as Kei also taking a step towards him, and then Kei freezes.
"Uh. Sorry—" Kei jolts backwards, and finally turns to go inside, and Tadashi looks down and why is Kei's hand up between them, was he– was he going to reach for Tadashi? What?! Kei's hands immediately go into the pockets of his pants, balled into fists, and he's very pointedly looking at everywhere except Tadashi's eyes, and then he's looking at Tadashi's face but just below his eyes—wait, does that mean—
"Do you have to go now?"
"Yes, um, I mean no—" Tadashi remembers he will die if he has to sleep side-by-side with Tsukki, "—I mean, no as in yes. I should, uh, go get my stuff from your room, and—"
"Okay, yeah, that sounds like a good idea—"
Kei walks him to his room, and only stands in the hallway in front of his door instead of going inside as Tadashi grabs his bag. Tadashi almost misses the strap of it a few times, and feels like he's forgetting whuich side he wears his bag on when he's normal. In the small moment of being in Kei's bedroom, with the boy who owns it staring at him through the doorway, Tadashi has an incredibly dangerous thought:
This is definitely mutual.
They walk out together, like how the two of them had for Hinata and Kageyama, though that moment feels like it happened longer ago than it had.
"See you?"
"Yeah," Kei swallows after saying it and repeats it, in a voice like he's in a trance, "yeah."
Tadashi makes it home. He lies in bed on his stomach and his face half smothered in a pillow, and half of his nose can only breath in fabric so he's heaving a little more intensely to make up for it. But the heaving might just be from everything else, as his eyes are wide, and then suddenly squeezed as tight as possible so that Tadashi can replay the entire sequence as vividly as possible.
Tadashi is fifteen. He's maybe made the right decision, putting so much effort into befriending the one boy on the same wavelength as him.