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“You,” Youichi begins, with quivering-nigh-impassioned feeling, “aren’t going into the baths at the same time as him anymore.”
He’s trying to be as commanding as possible, but it’s difficult considering how…sensitive the subject matter is.
It doesn’t help that the recipient of his decree is looking at him, huge eyes guileless and aggrieved.
“Why?” Miyuki Kazuya demands, as though he doesn’t know, as though he’s oblivious, like a certain southpaw roommate who’s made his presence as indelible in Youichi’s life as gum he’d accidentally got stuck to his hair – and he likes his hair too much to just settle for snipping it off.
But since this isn’t Bakamura, and since the innocent act is basically wasted on Youichi, he hisses,
“It’s bad enough that I have to walk in on you two sucking face in my room – I am not gonna stand for you eyeing him up like that in front of the rest of the team!”
He pretends the hot flush he can sense crawling up his neck into his face is from the impatient ire this abysmal excuse of a captain is putting him through, as opposed to abject embarrassment at the things he’s being forced to say.
To his chagrin, Miyuki continues to peer up at him, doe-eyed and almost convincingly appalled – Youichi thinks “almost” because he’s well aware that Miyuki, by virtue of having no shame, is incapable of experiencing offence from what he’s barely even implying.
“We’ve been to the baths together before,” Miyuki complains, one hand tugging the towel hanging round his neck a bit more securely lest it slip off – the other’s holding up a plastic basket of toiletries, and Youichi, having planted himself as a human barricade at the entrance to the showers, thanks whichever god had decided to cut him some slack today since at least this way Miyuki can’t try to barge in past him.
“Yeah, well, before, you weren’t trying to get into his pants.”
Miyuki feigns a gasp, affecting a look so wounded Youichi is a little tempted to roundhouse kick him.
In the face.
“Kuramochi-kun is so vulgar.”
Youchi growls. “Not as vulgar as a certain idiot who’s in a relationship with a certain other idiot who also happens to be a minor and hasn’t probably gone beyond first-base yet and should not be in the same vicinity as the former idiot when they’re both naked.”
The somewhat strained emphasis that last word inadvertently takes on almost makes the mask of wholesomeness Miyuki’s gotten so good at using with their teachers crack – there’s a ghost of a smirk, the sly, shit-eating one that habitually sets Youichi through the paces of his daily regimen of patience exercises – but he manages to keep going with the charade.
“I’m a minor too,” Miyuki points out, and Youichi, in regretful retrospect, wonders why he’d just not decided to spare himself the trouble by rescheduling his own baths, and avoid the singular purgatory of trying not to think about the bent of the thoughts this unapologetic, unequivocally perverted bastard might be having about clueless, unassuming Bakamura, all innocent and unsuspecting and underage, in public and amidst the rest of the team, and Youichi’s repulsed and kind of lightheaded and on the verge of point-blank unravelling from the assault on his moral compass –
When something compact and solid collides squarely into his back.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry!” the source of the universe’s headaches – or at least Youichi’s – grips Youichi’s forearm in both his hands and steadies him, expression pinched with remorse, “Senpai, are you okay?”
As much as Youichi’d been in the mood to obliterate whoever’d almost just rammed him into the ground, at least Sawamura has the decency to be genuinely apologetic, and it says something about the world and its paradoxical sense of humour that Miyuki could stand to learn a thing or two from this hopeless kid about a thing called tact. He swallows the blustery rant he’d been about to unleash, and grumbles, “Watch where you’re going idiot.”
“Sorry!” Sawamura adds in a contrite bow which ends up looking more like a spasm from how rigid it is, and it’s only then that he acknowledges Miyuki’s presence there. “Hi.”
And here’s a thing Youichi can never get used to – here’s a thing like imagining Ryou-san developing a sudden aptitude for romance novels or Jun-san speaking demurely, and every time he witnesses it, sees the way Sawamura sort of…softens, all sweet tender smiles and warm glows the type you see on a morning after it’s rained, the sun’s edges smudged out by mist and cloud when he’s around Miyuki…it unsettles him, the bone-jarring feel of a misstep just short of hitting base.
“Um…can we play catch after you shower?” Sawamura asks, and it’s not even so much of a visible change – but it’s there, and Youichi can sense it, and he can’t quite decide if he finds it nauseating or oddly poignant.
Miyuki smirks. “Playing after a shower is kind of counter-intuitive,” he says, genial and entirely insincere; when Sawamura frowns though, lower lip jutting out into a pout, Miyuki adds an easy shrug, “We’ll see.”
This is evidently a good enough answer for Sawamura, who, at an earlier time, would have probably resorted to hefting Miyuki up by the collar and noisily grappling with him until he got something more closely resembling commitment.
Instead, he just smiles brightly and flounces off.
It’s all so very tranquil and calm and seamless, whispers you see but can’t hear, only there if you’re looking, and sometimes it makes Youichi feel awkward – sometimes, it makes him feel like an intruder, a foreign presence in a space and time he doesn’t belong, looking into things like secrets not meant for him to be privy to.
So he does what he usually does, and grumbles, “Get a room, for fuck’s sake,” as he ambles off, because it beats the alternative of admitting that in spite of the sheer outlandish weirdness of having two of the people in his immediate radius getting all love-struck and smitten round each other, he doesn’t exactly mind – even if one is oftentimes as obtuse as a plank and the other a bit too conniving, and neither have any reasonable concept of propriety, he’s been invested enough in this to actually play the unenviable role of cupid…
And so, when he saunters past the indoor gym and hears snatches of laughter, bubbly animated voices tuned too low for him to make out the words and the swish-thud-smack of pitches like gunshots distinctly absent, he supposes he can deign to grin and bear it.