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There are mornings that announce themselves as ordinary and then, somewhere in the middle of the day, become something else entirely. The eighth of August was, for Isagi Yoichi, one of these. It began the way any free day began: no training, no Ego waiting somewhere with a clipboard and, nothing scheduled but the wide, unclaimed hours in front of him and it was only once Bachira had arrived, loud and grinning in the doorway with the whole morning still ahead of them, that Isagi understood the day had already stopped being ordinary the moment he'd decided to spend it making something with him.
He had not planned it, not really. He was always better at noticing things. He read a room, a pitch, a person, and adjusted, again and again, chasing the shape of what was needed rather than arriving already knowing it. And what he had noticed, turning the question over for the better part of a week, was that Bachira had asked for nothing despite Isagi pushing.
"I just want to spend the whole day with you," Bachira had said, when Isagi asked what he wanted for his birthday, and he had said it so easily, without calculation, that Isagi had spent several days afterward feeling faintly outmaneuvered by it. Because nothing was, in its own way, the hardest possible thing to give someone. There was no right or easy answer. There was no drill he could run, no training he could put in beforehand to be sure he'd gotten it right. And so, three days before the eighth, standing in his kitchen with no better idea presenting itself, Isagi had opened his laptop and searched, a little sheepishly, for a birthday cake recipe, on the theory them making something together would be better then just spending time together.
He printed it out. He read it twice on the morning of, half out of nerves and half because he genuinely wasn't sure he trusted himself not to mess up the order of the steps, and he was still holding the page, faintly damp at the corner from where he'd gripped it as he washed his hands a little bit ago, when the doorbell rang.
Before that, though, there had been an hour entirely his own, and Isagi had spent nearly all of it in a state that he would, if pressed, have refused to call nervousness, though it resembled nothing else. He had gone to the store the evening before and stood for what felt like an unreasonable length of time in front of the baking aisle, holding two different bags of flour as though the choice between them carried some weight beyond their price, reading the backs of chocolate chip bags for a sign, any sign, that one brand might make him a better boyfriend than the other. He was aware, dimly, that this was a faintly ridiculous way to spend a Tuesday evening. He bought both bags of flour anyway, just in case, on the theory that if one recipe failed they’d have a second attempt waiting, and he did not examine too closely what that theory said about how much he trusted the first attempt to go well.
That morning he had woken early, well before any reasonable hour required it, and had lain in bed for a while listening to the building settle around him, running through the day in the way he always did before big matches—Bachira arrives, they bake, the cake turns out, they spend the afternoon doing whatever pleased Bachira most, and somewhere in there Isagi would have proven, at least to himself, that he could give someone a good day. It was a strange kind of anxiety, one that didn't behave at all like the anxiety Blue Lock had trained into him.
He had laid the ingredients out at half past nine—flour, sugar, butter, eggs, a little dish of salt he didn’t remember if he needed—arranged along the counter in the order the recipe called for them, and had stood back to look at the arrangement the way he might survey a formation before a match, satisfied that everything, at least, was where it ought to be. It was not lost on him that this was probably not how normal people prepared to bake a cake. He suspected others simply started cooking. He suspected Bachira, if left entirely to his own devices, would have opened the pantry, thrown in whatever looked interesting, and called the result a birthday cake regardless of what emerged. Isagi envied that a little, the ease of it, the total absence of the small anxious voice that lived somewhere behind his sternum and asked, at regular intervals, whether he was doing this—whatever this happened to be—correctly.
He checked the oven temperature twice. He checked his phone once, to see if Bachira had texted, and felt something in his chest loosen slightly at the sight of a message that said only omw!! you better be excited! with no further explanation offered or needed, and he was still smiling faintly at his phone, the recipe forgotten for a moment in his other hand, when the doorbell finally rang.
Bachira arrived at eleven, which for Bachira counted as remarkably punctual, and he came in talking before Isagi had even gotten the door fully open—something about a cat on the walk over, its tail curved like a question mark, and wasn't that a good omen, didn't Isagi think that was a good omen—and he did not so much enter the apartment as flood it, filling the small kitchen with a warmth that had nothing to do with the oven Isagi had preheated twenty minutes before out of some vague sense that being ready mattered.
"Happy birthday," Isagi said, and it came out a little more earnest than he'd meant it to.
"You said that this morning too. On the phone."
"I know. I wanted to say it again in person. It counts differently." He put his thumbs up awkwardly.
Bachira looked at him for a second too long, something soft moving behind his eyes, and then grinned, wide and quick, before the moment could get too heavy to carry. "You're being cute today."
"I'm not being anything. I'm just happy you're here."
"See, that's cute. Stop it, you're going to make me blush before we've even started baking." Bachira said batting his eyes, and spinning around.
Isagi laughed, and some of the nervous static that had been humming under his skin all morning eased off a little. He held up the printed recipe like a peace offering, or possibly evidence.
"I found something for us to bake. I don't know if it's good. I read a lot of comments on it, people seemed to like it—"
"Isagi." Bachira took the page from him, scanned it upside down for a second before turning it right-side up, clearly not reading it so much as enjoying that it existed. "You researched a cake recipe."
"I wanted it to turn out okay! I've never actually baked anything before, I didn't want to just guess and have it be terrible." He said fast, looking a bit flushed,
"That's so sweet I might throw up a little." Bachira was already moving past him toward the counter, already reaching for the flour bag Isagi had set out, and there was no venom at all in the teasing, only that bright, easy delight that seemed to live permanently somewhere just under his skin. "Okay. Teach me. I've never made anything that wasn't microwaved." Bachira said with dead seriousness.
"I mean — I've also never made anything, my mom cooks for me. We're sort of starting even."
"Even better. Let's be bad at this together!" He said jumping at Isagi.
The trouble, if it could be called trouble, began almost immediately, because Isagi had barely gotten the flour measured into the bowl, checking the number on the kitchen scale twice, murmuring the ounces to himself the way he might murmur a set of coordinates before a run—when he felt something soft land on the bridge of his nose.
He looked up. Bachira was standing very close, one finger raised, a smear of white already ghosting into his hair, and on his face was an expression of such open joy that Isagi's first instinct to worry, absurdly, that he'd get flour in the batter and throw off the ratio the recipe called for, but he simply lost the argument before it had finished forming.
"You had some on your face already," Bachira said, which was not remotely true.
"I did not. You just put that there."
"I improved it! You're welcome." He said grinning and putting his thumbs up.
Isagi wiped at his nose, succeeding mostly in spreading the flour further, and Bachira laughed at him—not unkindly, never unkindly, just with the total, unguarded delight of someone who found him funny and had decided, a long time ago, not to hide that he thought so. Isagi felt his ears go warm and busied himself with the next line of the recipe, half to hide it, though he suspected Bachira noticed anyway. Bachira noticed everything about him, eventually. It used to unsettle Isagi, being read that easily. Now it mostly just made him feel like less of a stranger to himself.
"Okay, next it says to cream the butter and sugar," Isagi said, squinting at the page. "Four- it says four minutes? That seems like a long time to just stir something.."
"Does it say why?"
"No, it just says four minutes."
"Then we're not doing four minutes. We're doing however long feels right." Bachira had already claimed the mixing spoon and was going at the bowl with more enthusiasm than technique, sugar occasionally escaping over the rim. "Recipes are just, like, someone else's guess. We can guess too!"
"I don't think that's how baking works, actually—" Isagi started, and then stopped, because Bachira was watching him with a look that wasn't teasing this time, just curious, waiting to see whether Isagi would insist on the four minutes or let it go, and Isagi found, a little to his own surprise, that he didn't actually care very much about the four minutes. He cared about the sugar getting on the floor and Bachira's hair collecting flour like a mop and the two of them being bad at the same thing together in a kitchen that smelled, faintly and pleasantly, like vanilla. "You know what, forget the four minutes. Do it your way."
"That's the spirit." Bachira beamed at him like he'd won something. Possibly he had.
They creamed the butter and sugar for what Isagi guessed was closer to nine minutes than four, mostly because Bachira had turned it into a competition; who could keep stirring the longest without stopping, a contest with no prize and no real winner and no purpose whatsoever beyond the fact that Bachira had declared it existed and Isagi, arm aching pleasantly by the end of it, found he'd laughed more in twenty minutes of pointless stirring than he generally laughed in a week of ordinary days. There was something almost dizzying about it, the way Bachira could take a task with no stakes at all and fill it up with stakes anyway, invented ones, joyful ones, the kind that cost nothing to lose.
"I win," Bachira announced eventually, setting his spoon down with great ceremony.
"You don't even know how long you stirred for, I won." He crossed his arms, his voice stern in a playful way.
"Doesn't matter. I win in the birthday category."
"That's not a real category."
"Everything's a real category if you believe in it hard enough." Bachira reached over and swiped a fingerful of batter straight from the bowl, entirely unbothered by the eggs still sitting raw inside it, and Isagi opened his mouth to object on the general principle of food safety and then closed it again, watching Bachira's face do something unguarded and pleased as he tasted it. "Not bad. A little sweet."
"It's cake batter, it's supposed to be sweet."
"I know. I'm just saying it like a judge on a cooking show. Doesn't it feel more official that way?"
"Nothing about this has felt official at any point."
"Exactly. That's the good part."
Somewhere between the eggs and the chocolate chips, Isagi lost track of the recipe entirely, less because he'd decided to abandon it and more because Bachira had simply decided they weren’t following it. The whole operation became something that no longer resembled a recipe at all. He'd found the chocolate chip bag and had begun feeding fistfuls of it into the batter with the unhurried confidence of a boy who had never once in his life worried about ruining anything, and Isagi, glancing at the recipe's modest suggestion of half a cup, opened his mouth to say something about it and then just… didn't.
"That's a lot of chocolate chips," he said instead, which was as close as he could get to an objection.
"There's no such thing as too many chocolate chips. Ask anyone."
"I feel like a scientist would disagree."
"Then the scientist has never had a good birthday." Bachira dropped another handful in, grinning at him sideways. "Every bite should have one. That's the whole point of a birthday cake. What's the point of birthday if you don't get chocolate in every bite?"
Isagi didn't really have an answer for that, and found, watching him, that he didn't especially want one. There was something in the way Bachira moved through the kitchen swaying slightly to music that wasn't playing, narrating an increasingly nonsensical story about the chocolate chips being tiny soldiers going to their doom in a great war that made the careful, orderly version of this afternoon Isagi had half-pictured in his head feel not wrong, exactly, just smaller than what was actually happening. He kept meaning to correct something: the measurements, the order of steps, the amount of batter currently on the counter rather than in the bowl and kept, instead, just watching, a little helplessly, a little happily, the whole plan derail further from the tracks.
"You're not even looking at the recipe," Isagi said, laughing despite himself.
"Neither are you. You're looking at me."
He wasn't wrong. Isagi felt his face go warm again and picked the recipe back up mostly for something to do with his hands, though he didn't actually read it, and Bachira, watching him not-read it, laughed the way he laughed when he'd won an argument without either of them fully noticing it had happened.
The cake that came out of the oven forty minutes later bore only the faintest resemblance to the photograph on Isagi's printed page. It had risen unevenly, high on one side and sunk low on the other, tilting faintly in its pan like that one tower; the chocolate chips, so generously donated, had mostly sunk to the bottom and fused there into a dark, scorched layer that would not release from the pan no matter how carefully Isagi worked a knife around the edge. What remained above it was pale, a little gummy in the center, undercooked in the exact spot where the recipe had sworn a toothpick would come out clean.
Isagi stood over it for a long moment, feeling something that wasn't quite disappointment and wasn't quite worry but sat somewhere close to both.
"I don't — I don't know what happened," he said, half to himself, already running back through the steps in his head, the way he might replay a missed shot. "Maybe the extra chocolate changed how it baked, or maybe I should've checked it earlier, I don't know, I really thought I followed it close enough that—"
"Isagi."
"—like, if I'd caught it ten minutes earlier maybe the middle would've—"
"Isagi." Bachira's hand landed on his arm, easy and warm, and Isagi stopped, aware all at once that he'd been talking mostly to fill a silence that had started to feel like a verdict. Bachira was looking at him, and there was no disappointment anywhere in his face at all just that same unhurried fondness, patient in a way Isagi still sometimes forgot he was allowed to receive. "You're worrying to much about it."
"A little. I wanted it to be good for you."
"It is good. Look at it. It's a disaster and I love it!" Bachira picked up the pan and turned it slightly, examining the sunken side with genuine, delighted interest, as though it were a museum piece. "This is the best-looking cake I've ever seen, actually. Every other cake is boring. This one has a whole personality and we made it."
"It's undercooked in the middle."
"So we eat the outsides first. Problem solved. You're overthinking a cake, which is very funny because it is just a cake."
Isagi laughed, a little unsteadily, and felt the knot that had been sitting under his ribs since roughly the moment the oven timer went off finally start to loosen.
"I just wanted today to be good," Isagi admitted. "You said you didn't want anything, and I didn't really believe that, so I panicked a little and found a cake recipe."
"Today's already good." Bachira set the pan down and turned fully toward him, taking Isagi's face in both flour-dusted hands, the gesture so sudden and unguarded that Isagi's breath caught somewhere behind his sternum. "It's been good since you opened the door for me. The cake was never the part I actually wanted."
"You could've told me that before I bought four kinds of chocolate."
"And miss watching you get flour on your nose? Never." He kissed him, quickly pressed against the cheek, chocolate still faintly at the corner of his mouth, and Isagi who had spent the better part of the morning quietly terrified of getting this one small thing wrong felt the fear finally let go of him completely, replaced by something much simpler. "You worry too much about whether you're doing it right. You're always doing it right. You're here, that’s what I truly wanted for my birthday."
There was, despite everything, still frosting to be dealt with, because Isagi had bought a tub of it the evening before alongside his two competing bags of flour, on the theory that even a cake gone wrong might be improved by enough sugar piled on top of it, and Bachira had seized on this discovery with the delight of a someone who had just been handed a new and unsupervised weapon.
"We're not done," he said, prying the lid off the tub before Isagi could object. "A cake this bad needs a lot of frosting. Structural amounts."
"I don't think frosting is structural and I don’t think that’s the right word."
"It is today. It's load-bearing." Bachira had already found a butter knife and was applying frosting to the sunken cake with the same loose, joyful abandon he'd brought to everything else that morning, smoothing it thick over the tilted crown, letting it pool and slide into the collapsed valley on the far side rather than fighting the shape of the thing. "See, look, it's fixing itself already."
"It's hiding the problem, not fixing it."
"Same thing, if you frost it enough." He held out the knife, handle first, an unmistakable dare in his eyes. "Your turn. Don't overthink it."
Isagi took the knife and, true to form, spent a moment longer than strictly necessary considering the angle of approach before Bachira, losing patience with a speed that would have been insulting from anyone else, simply took his wrist and guided it himself, dragging a long uneven swipe of white across the top of the cake, laughing the whole time at Isagi's small, betrayed noise of protest.
"There. See? Doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be frosting."
"You're going to make me spill it."
"I am absolutely going to make you spill it, that's half the plan." As if summoned, a dollop landed on the back of Isagi's hand, and before he could react Bachira had leaned down and licked it off him, grinning up at him afterward with an expression so unbothered by its own audacity that Isagi felt the tips of his ears go hot for what must have been the fourth or fifth time that morning.
"You can't just- you can’t just do that!"
"I can. I did. You didn't stop me." He said proudly putting his hands to his hips.
"I didn't get the chance to. I was frosting the cake!"
"Excuses." Bachira had already turned back to the cake, adding one final, wholly unnecessary blob to the top, standing back afterward to survey the result with the satisfied air of an artist stepping away from a finished canvas. What faced them now was, if anything, a stranger sight than the plain sunken cake had been. A lopsided crater of sponge cake buried beneath an avalanche of white frosting, burnt chocolate chips still visible in areas where the icing had thinned, the whole structure looking less like a birthday cake than like something that had been dropped on the floors. "Okay. Now it's perfect."
"It looks worse." Isagi grimaced.
"It looks like us. That's better than perfect." Bachira slung an arm around Isagi's shoulders, sticky fingers and all, and considered their creation with open pride. "I'm framing this memory. Not the cake, obviously, the cake's going in the trash eventually. The memory."
“Bachira.. I don’t think it’s a good thing that the cake looks like us.”
They ate a slice of it anyway, sitting on the kitchen floor with their backs against the cabinets because neither of them could be bothered to find the table, and it was, by any fair measure, a bad cake burnt at the bottom, collapsing under the fork, the chocolate chips tasting more like the memory of chocolate than chocolate itself. Bachira ate his with theatrical enthusiasm, declaring each bite the best thing he'd ever tasted in a tone that made it impossible to tell where the joke ended and the honesty began, which Isagi had come to understand was simply how Bachira meant most of what he said both things at once, sincerity wrapped up in play because that was the only way he'd ever learned to hand it over safely.
Isagi on the other hand was gagging through every bite of the cake.
"We should probably go get real dessert somewhere," Isagi said, looking at the wreckage between them with dread. "I don't think there's a version of this that becomes dinner."
"Yeah, I think we killed it." Bachira grinned, unbothered, licking a smear of chocolate off his thumb. "It died with honor, though."
"I really am sorry it didn't turn out well."
"Stop apologizing. I keep telling you, the turning-out-part was never the point." Bachira leaned his head onto Isagi's shoulder, like it had always belonged exactly there. "You spent your whole morning trying to make something nice for me. That's the gift. The cake was just what the gift happened to look like on the outside."
Isagi didn't entirely know how to answer that, so he didn't try to; he just let the quiet sit there between them, comfortable, unhurried, and pressed a kiss into Bachira's hair, tasting flour, not minding it at all.
“You should probably wash your face before we go out anywhere..” Isagi said running a hand through Bachira’s short hair.
“I’ll think about it.” He said leaning into Isagi’s hand.
Later they went, in the end, to the small restaurant a few streets over that Bachira swore made the best dessert in the neighborhood, on the theory, delivered with total conviction, that a birthday came with the sacred right to choose without consulting a menu. He ordered for both of them, and Isagi who might once have wanted to see the menu himself, just to know what was coming found he didn't mind at all, content to let the day keep being handed to him in pieces he hadn't planned.
What arrived was a small pastry decorated with gold leaf and a careful curl of frosting, exact in a way no home kitchen could easily manage. It was, when Isagi tried it, genuinely excellent. And yet, watching Bachira across the table, chin propped on one hand, eyes half-closed with unhurried pleasure, humming that same tuneless hum he'd hummed over the mixing bowl. Isagi found that the restaurant's careful dessert moved him rather less than the memory of the crooked, burnt, entirely uneatable cake still sitting on his kitchen counter. This one was good it didn’t make him want to barf. It had been made by hands that knew exactly what they were doing. But nobody's flour had ended up on anybody's nose in the making of it. Nobody had danced to no music at all, just because dancing seemed like the better use of the afternoon.
"You're staring," Bachira said, not looking up, a small private smile at the corner of his mouth.
"Just thinking."
"About the cake?"
"About how you already knew what today was supposed to be, before I'd even figured it out." Isagi turned his cup slowly on the table, not quite meeting his eyes. "I kept trying to make something good for you. You just wanted to spend time with me."
Bachira looked up at that, something quick and unguarded moving across his face. He set his spoon down and reached across the table, taking Isagi's hand in both of his, chocolate still faintly ghosting one knuckle from a dessert he'd probably forgotten to wash off before they left the apartment.
"Best birthday I've ever had," he said, quietly, all performance gone from his voice. "And we didn't even really do anything. We just made a mess and ate it together and worried about a cake for a little while. It means a lot to me that I have someone who would simply just spend the day with me.”
"I can plan something bigger next year, if you want. Now that I know what I'm doing. Sort of..”
"No." Bachira shook his head, thumb moving once, absent, across the back of Isagi's hand. "This. Every year, if you'll let me. You, worrying about a cake because you wanted it to be nice for me, thats all. I don't need it to be bigger than a kitchen with you in it, getting flour on your face and apologizing to a dessert."
"I wasn't apologizing to the dessert.?"
"You definitely told it 'sorry' when it collapsed inwards. I heard you."
Isagi laughed, caught, and didn't bother denying it, because it was probably true, and because Bachira was looking at him like it was the funniest and dearest thing he'd ever caught him doing, and there didn't seem to be any reason left to be embarrassed about it.
They walked home slow, in no hurry at all, the August evening settling warm and gold over streets that had mostly emptied for the night. Bachira stopped twice to examine things that didn't strictly need examining a crack in the pavement he swore was shaped like a fox running through a grove, a shop window of secondhand records he narrated in increasingly improbable detail, inventing whole histories for bands that had, in all likelihood, never done a single thing Bachira listed and Isagi simply let himself be pulled along by all of it, hand in Bachira's hand, saying little, just listening, thinking that there was a kind of attention in Bachira that the world had never quite figured out how to measure. It didn't show up anywhere official. It showed up here, instead, in a crack shaped like a fox and a whole afternoon's worth of trust handed over so easily it had almost slipped past Isagi unnoticed.
The home still smelled faintly of scorched sugar when they got back, and the ruined cake still sat under its loose sheet of plastic wrap, tilted and sunken, exactly as they'd left it. Isagi looked at it a moment from the doorway and felt none of the earlier worry come back at all only a strange, settled fondness, the kind reserved for a photo of yourself taken badly, at an awkward angle, on a day that had mattered more than the picture let on.
"We should probably throw that out," he said.
"Tomorrow." Bachira had already kicked his shoes off and was crossing the kitchen in sock feet, sliding a little on a patch of flour neither of them had swept up. "I want to keep looking at it a little longer. It's a good disaster. I like remembering the good ones."
Isagi crossed the room and pulled him in, flour and all, and didn't bother with a careful response, because for once he didn't have one ready, and found he didn't need one.
"Next year," he said, into the crown of Bachira's hair, "I'm not going to worry so much."
"Liar. You'll worry the whole time and then tell me you didn't."
"Maybe. But I'll let you throw the chocolate chips in first. Before I can talk myself into measuring them."
Bachira laughed against his shoulder, low and delighted, and Isagi held on, thinking that he'd spent so much of his life afraid of getting things wrong that he'd nearly missed how simple it actually was to get this one right: not through care laid out in careful numbered steps, but just by staying, exactly as he was, in a kitchen that smelled like a small, happy failure, with someone who had never once needed him to be anything more than there.