Work Text:
At 8:16pm sharp, Nirei texts Sakura panicking about a paper he hasn't written that's due the next day. It's the first time Sakura uses the call function in his life, fumbling with the controls as he yells down the line in response to Nirei's intermittent wails.
"Should I skip school tomorrow?" Nirei despairs the second he picks up. "Oh my god, what do I do, what if I skip school tomorrow to finish it and I still don't finish it and then I have to skip the next day too and Sensei refuses my submission because it's two days late and—"
"WHAT DO YOU MEAN PAPER," Sakura shouts. "WHAT PAPER? THERE WAS A PAPER?"
"From a month ago, Sakura-san!" Nirei frets. "What do I do? Do I skip school tomorrow? Do I fake my death and escape to Scotland? Do you think a sheep farmer would take me on as an unpaid assistant in return for lodging and food? What if I can’t wake up at 4am and they kick me off their property and then I’ll be stuck in the UK with nothing to my name—"
Sakura vaguely remembers their teacher mentioning something about a paper in class. He was napping through it, though, so it's not like he knows what it was about. He spends 5 minutes assuring Nirei that he would make an excellent Scottish sheep farmer—the type to make individualised character sheets for each sheep—and then another 5 minutes figuring out the details of the assignment with Nirei's help before he hangs up. He takes a final 4 minutes to bang his fist against the tatami flooring of his bedroom a few times, thanking the heavens that he has no neighbours to snitch on him.
At 8:30pm, Sakura sits down at his small, shin-height foldable desk. He cracks his neck, stretches his arms, and slaps his face. He’s ready to fight god.
At 9:30pm, Sakura has counted every individual thread in his tatami flooring at least once. He’s now shifted to staring blankly up at the ceiling with half-formed arguments and sentences swimming in his head, most of them for the apology letter he’s definitely going to owe Sensei when he shows up to school tomorrow.
At 10pm, Sakura texts Nirei, Wow I think I’m dying. He swipes back to the list of chats on his phone, ponders how much pride he could possibly have to lose at this point, and texts Suo.
Suo, the bastard, leaves him on delivered. Does the guy religiously sleep before 10pm every night or something? Sakura scowls at his screen, but the quiet ping! that indicates a new message wipes the expression off his face. He taps on the pop-up notification that appears, thumb moving before he even thinks.
Wow I think I’m dying, Nirei’s message parrots back at him. Sakura snorts and watches the three dots of the typing icon bounce up and down, waiting patiently for the next message. The paper can wait. What’s one more hour wasted, anyway?
Sakura is awoken the next morning by the sound of his ringtone. He snorts and jolts awake, instinctively wiping at the dried line of drool that itches on his cheek. His phone lies beside him, buzzing like an angry hive of bees.
When he picks up, Nirei’s voice crackles over the line.
“Sakura-san, what do I do, I’m genuinely going to die oh my god, I haven’t written out my will yet, how is my mom going to know to bequeath my cow cat plushie to you—?”
“Calm down,” Sakura says, voice scratchy as he grabs his Furin jacket. He’s already booking it for the front door, ready to slip on his shoes and run off to wherever Nirei is. With a pause, he considers the tea kettle Suo left by the sink the last time he came over. A tea kettle is a pretty good weapon to knock someone out with, right?
“But my essay, Sakura-san,” Nirei howls, distraught, through the shitty phone speaker that Sakura never bothered to fix.
Sakura freezes, currently balanced on one foot as he pulls on his other shoe. His one arm, which was reaching out towards the tea kettle, drops. From where he’s sandwiched his phone between his cheek and shoulder, it vibrates with the force of another melancholic bawl. He sighs.
“What’s wrong with your essay?”
“I LEFT IT AT HOME,” comes blasting through Sakura’s phone with the force of a thousand suns. Sakura winces and shifts his phone into his hand so it’s no longer right next to his ear.
“Are you going to print yours out on the way to school?” Nirei asks frantically. “If you are, could you print mine out too? I’m so sorry but I’m already at the school gate, so I can’t go back home and still make it back in time for homeroom...”
Sakura glances at the sad pile of empty papers scattered across his floor. Last night, in between furiously texting Nirei back and forth, he managed to squeeze out a total of three penned words. There’s a dried stain beside them of what appears to have been a small puddle of drool, one that he would rather die than admit to.
“Uh,” Sakura says. “Don’t worry about mine.”
Before Nirei can launch into another series of heartwrenching sobs, Sakura asks, “What’s your address? I haven’t left yet.”
Nirei’s house is bright and cheery, sparkling underneath the morning sun the same way Nirei’s smile does when he sees Sakura cross the threshold of the classroom every morning. Even their front door is doused in a sunny yellow, just a few shades off from Nirei’s hair dye, when Sakura hesitantly reaches out and knocks against it.
“Coming!” a voice calls from inside, so Sakura sets himself to wait.
A few moments later, the door swings open to reveal a middle-aged lady. The head of curls she sports matches the brown roots at the very base of Nirei’s hair, and her crow’s feet crinkles welcomingly when her mouth curves into the same smile Nirei has. Or maybe, Sakura reconsiders, it’s that Nirei has her smile instead.
“Sakura, right? Akihiko said you’d be coming by.”
The woman who’s unmistakably Nirei’s mother ushers Sakura in. She insists when he declines with a red face and redder ears, matching Nirei in her persistence, but gives in when Sakura remains stubbornly in the genkan. With a quick trip deeper into the house, she delivers a stack of printed papers to Sakura. When she pushes an additional package of cookies into his hands, he sputters and tries to refuse.
“How can I let you leave empty-handed?” she huffs, like the very notion is an affront to her very person. “Especially after all you’ve done for my Akihiko.”
Like getting him beaten up in an abandoned warehouse, Sakura’s mind supplies helpfully.
“I—uh,” Sakura clears his throat, trying his best to remember every polite phrase he’s learned in his life. “I haven’t done much.”
“Nonsense!” Nirei’s mother frowns. “He talks about you all the time! Sakura-san this, Sakura-san that, always going on and on about how great of a friend you are.”
Friend. Not “fighter”, or “classmate”, or even “grade captain”. A friend.
Scarlet crawls up Sakura’s face and settles firmly on his cheeks. All of a sudden, standing right inside Nirei’s house, with his essay in one hand and cookies in the other, something lodges in his throat.
“Honestly,” Sakura mutters, ears flaming, “I haven’t done anything.”
“Of course you’ve done something,” Nirei’s mother admonishes. “You were his first friend.”
Sakura dares to chance a peek at her face, and Nirei’s mother is smiling softly at him. The curl of her lips is painfully familiar, and Sakura searches his memories until he realises. It’s identical to the way Nirei smiles at him, in fleeting moments of a lull in their busy lives, creasing the corners of his eyes and quirking one side of his mouth higher than the other. It’s an expression that screams affection, practically leaks it from each crevice, so overwhelming in its warmth that Sakura fears he may drown in it.
“Akihiko is just so headstrong, you know?” Nirei’s mother sighs. “When he told me he wanted to go to Furin, nothing I said could dissuade him. I was so worried that he would come home injured like he did in middle school.”
Sakura flinches imperceptibly. He thinks back to the floor of that abandoned warehouse, sees in perfect clarity Nirei’s bloodied face, half-lidded eyes, slack mouth, laboured breathing, the slump of his shoulder against the dirt. The way Sakura found him passed out against the wall outside the warehouse afterwards, dried blood brown and tacky on his skin.
The colour stained the sleeve of Sakura’s Furin jacket when he reached out to rub it off, and left a permanent mark that he couldn’t get rid off no matter how long he scrubbed it, but he didn’t really mind.
“The first day of school, though,” Nirei’s mother beams, like she’s recalling the memory as she describes it, “He came home talking about this amazing boy who saved him and defeated a bunch of bullies by himself, told him he wasn’t all that pathetic, had a table thrown at him in the morning then picked a fight with an opposing team’s vice-captain.”
Sakura attempts to hide the way he chokes, and shuffles nervously on his feet. He doesn’t quite know how to act in front of an adult who’s aware of everything he’s done but treats him so warmly regardless.
“Oh dear!” Nirei’s mother glances worriedly at the time and motions for him to hurry, “I’ve kept you far too long. I do hope I won’t make you late for school…”
As Sakura reaches for the door, crinkling the plastic bag of cookies in his grip while avoiding crumpling Nirei’s essay, he hears Nirei’s mother speak up again from behind him.
“Thank you, Sakura,” she smiles, with a few notes of sorrow in her voice. “For taking care of my son.”
Barely in sight from Sakura’s perspective, there’s a whole line of photos positioned haphazardly along the top of a cupboard. In them, Sakura can easily distinguish the mess of curls that depicts Nirei, grinning as widely as he can next to his parents. When Nirei’s mother rushed to greet Sakura, there was the sound of a tap shutting off as if she had been washing dishes left over from a home-cooked breakfast. At the corner where the genkan opens up into the rest of the house, there’s white marks forming vague shapes against the wallpaper. They’re dotted by residual glue and scratches, like the years-old remnants of frenzied parents trying to scrape off stickers stuck on by a misbehaving toddler.
It’s a home filled with so much love. There are years upon years of memories packed into this place, made by a family that culminated into the boy Sakura knows today. Sakura is choked up purely by standing at its entrance.
“I-it’s no problem,” Sakura stares at a spot off to the side, where there’s a chip in the wall left by years of shoes accidentally knocking into the corner as their owners returned home.
“If anything,” he mumbles, barely audible, “He’s the one taking care of me.”
Nirei greets Sakura by faceplanting straight into him with a hug.
With a shiver, Sakura registers the rapidly-wetting patch on his shirt as Nirei’s tears. The sensation is unfamiliarly cold against his skin and he retreats as soon as Nirei’s arms loosen.
“I’m so sorry, Sakura-san,” Nirei blubbers tearfully, “I made you go out of your way…!”
Sakura frowns. “I wouldn’t have suggested it if I didn’t want to.”
Nirei sniffs. His eyes are big and watery and sparkling, and Sakura shoves the essay at Nirei’s face to cancel out the way it makes his heart beat weirdly in his chest.
“Your mom’s nice,” he offers belatedly.
“She’s wanted to meet you forever!” Nirei perks up. “You should come over again after school, she pesters me all the time about bringing you home.”
Sakura’s not exactly the type of friend parents would usually condone for their kids. Thanks to Nirei, though, Nirei’s mother obviously knows what Sakura gets up to on a regular basis. Despite that, she welcomed him into their house and gave him cookies and thanked him for being friends with her son.
Nirei’s eyes are somehow even wider, now, pupils wobbling as he stares pleadingly up at Sakura. Sakura’s heart seizes in his chest.
“Well,” Sakura acquiesces, heat enveloping his entire face, “I guess I can.”