Chapter Text
The Tokyo branch of Onigiri Miya smelled like rice before the sun came up.
It was a clean smell, starchy and warm, the kind that had worked itself so deeply into the walls and the floorboards and the grain of the wood counter that Osamu could not escape it even when he left, even when he showered, even when he lay in his apartment upstairs at two in the morning listening to the city outside and waiting for sleep that would not come. He used to find the smell comforting. Lately it had started to feel like something else, less like warmth and more like a reminder, quiet and relentless, that this was his life now. That this was all of it.
He was twenty-seven. He had four restaurants.
By any reasonable measure, things were going well.
He told himself that every morning when he tied his apron in the grey pre-dawn quiet of his kitchen. He told himself that when he unlocked the front door and flipped on the lights and stood alone in the beautiful, carefully designed space he had spent the better part of the last year building. He told himself that when the lunch rush came and the compliments came with it and his staff moved with the easy efficiency he had trained them toward, and the onigiri moved across the counter in their neat rows, and everything worked exactly the way it was supposed to.
He told himself, and he almost believed it, and by the end of the day it had worn thin enough to see through.
The truth was that Osamu had been deteriorating for months, slowly and quietly, in the way that things deteriorate when no one is watching closely enough. Not all at once. Just a little more each week, a little more each time something went wrong that he had to absorb alone, a little more each night he climbed the stairs to his apartment and the silence up there pressed in on him like something physical.
He had lost weight without intending to. He noticed it most in the mornings, the way his clothes sat differently on his shoulders, the way his face in the bathroom mirror looked sharper than it used to. His appetite was unreliable at best. Some days food tasted like nothing at all, and some days the smell of it made him faintly sick, and on the days when he could actually eat he did so mechanically, standing over the counter in his apartment, not tasting. A chef who cooked for hundreds of people and could not bring himself to sit down for a meal. He understood the irony. He did not find it particularly funny.
Sleep had become something he negotiated with rather than something that simply happened. He fell asleep eventually, most nights, after lying in the dark long enough that his body gave up and surrendered, but it was never enough and it never felt restoring. He woke before his alarm every morning with a low, dull dread already settled in his chest, familiar as the smell of rice, equally inescapable.
He had stopped calling Atsumu as often. That, perhaps more than anything else, was the thing that frightened him if he let himself think about it.
They had always called. After high school, through the years when volleyball had pulled them in different directions, through Atsumu's move to Osaka and the long, strange adjustment of living apart for the first time. They called because they were brothers and twins and because even when they drove each other absolutely insane they were also, underneath all of it, each other's most familiar person. That had not changed. Osamu did not think it could change.
But the calls had gotten shorter. And less frequent. And increasingly, when Atsumu's name appeared on his screen, Osamu looked at it for a moment too long before answering, trying to gather the energy it took to be recognizably himself.
Because Atsumu knew him. That was the problem. Atsumu could hear it in his voice within thirty seconds, the particular flatness that crept in when Osamu was not all right, and then he would start asking questions with that careful, trying-not-to-sound-worried tone he had, the one that was almost identical to their mother's and which Osamu found almost unbearable. So Osamu performed. He matched Atsumu's energy, met his jokes with jokes, let his brother vent about the training schedule or whatever ongoing domestic drama was unfolding in his apartment in Osaka, and steered things away from himself whenever they drifted too close.
It was exhausting. Almost everything was exhausting now. But especially that, especially the work of maintaining the version of himself that his family expected, the competent and capable Osamu who had built four restaurants and was fine, was always fine, had always been the one who was fine.
He suspected, sometimes, that it was not working. That Atsumu could see past it anyway, because Atsumu was not actually stupid about the things that mattered, he was only loud about everything else. There were moments in their calls when his brother went quiet in a particular way, a pause that lasted a beat too long before he changed the subject, and Osamu felt the back of his neck go hot with something that was not quite shame but lived very close to it.
The thing about Atsumu was that Atsumu had Sakusa now.
That was still a strange sentence to form, even in the privacy of his own head. Sakusa Kiyoomi and Miya Atsumu. They were strange together in every conceivable way, oil and water, light and dark, a man who expressed affection through insults and a man who seemed to receive that as the most natural thing in the world. Their love was, if Osamu was being honest, a very peculiar flavor. He had watched it develop from a distance with a kind of bewildered disbelief, because nothing about it made obvious sense and yet somehow it was the most solid and certain thing he had ever seen his brother be a part of.
Atsumu had someone to come home to. Someone to eat with. Someone who was there when he woke up and there when he went to sleep and there in all the unremarkable spaces in between that Osamu was only now understanding were, in fact, the whole point.
Osamu was not jealous. He refused to be jealous. He loved his brother and he was happy for him and he would carry that position to his grave.
But he was jealous. Quietly, shamefully, in a way that made him feel petty and ungrateful and very, very small.
Because the loneliness in Tokyo was not like any loneliness Osamu had experienced before. In Osaka, even when things were hard, there had been a texture to his life beyond the restaurant. People he knew. Places he went. The particular comfort of being somewhere that had accumulated enough of his presence to feel like his. He had not been especially close to many people even then, had always been the quieter twin, the more self-contained one, but there had been warmth. There had been bodies in rooms. There had been, for a little while, a guy from the gym who was not a relationship and Osamu had known perfectly well at the time that it was not, but at least there had been touch. At least there had been someone who looked at him like he was worth looking at.
That had been four years ago now.
He had not been in a serious relationship since then. Not really. Not in any way that counted.
He understood, in a distant and theoretical way, that this was not healthy. That humans needed contact in the same basic way they needed sleep and food, and that he had been quietly starving himself of it for four years while telling himself that he was simply too busy, that the time would come, that he would sort it out when things settled down. Things had never settled down. They had in fact done the opposite of settling down. And now he was here, in Tokyo, in a city of fourteen million people, and he was more alone than he had ever been anywhere.
His staff were professional and pleasant and entirely separate from him. His customers were kind and entirely temporary. His apartment above the restaurant was clean and bare and humming with a silence that had started to feel, on the worst nights, like a presence rather than an absence.
And then there was Akaashi.
Osamu had known him for years before Tokyo, the way you know someone who belongs to the same loose constellation of people without ever quite becoming central to each other. Since Bokuto and Atsumu played together for the Black Jackals in Osaka, Akaashi had always been somewhere nearby when the team gathered, quiet and precise at the edge of whatever chaos Bokuto was generating, occasionally saying something so dry and perfectly timed that Osamu had to look away to hide that he found it funny. They had existed in the same rooms at the same parties and exchanged the same pleasantries that people exchange when they are adjacent to each other through someone else, friendly without being friends.
What they had always shared, though, was food. Or more specifically: Akaashi had opinions about food that Osamu respected, which was not something he could say about most people. He was not precious about it, not performative. He simply knew what was good and said so plainly, and when Osamu cooked for the group he ate with the kind of focused, genuine attention that a chef notices and does not forget. He had also, on more than one occasion, asked Osamu when he was finally going to open something in Tokyo, with a directness that sat somewhere between a compliment and a formal request. Osamu had laughed it off every time. He had also thought about it for days afterward, which he kept to himself.
He had kept other things to himself as well.
Akaashi was smart in a way that showed in everything he did, in the precision of his language and the quality of his attention and the slight, devastating accuracy of his humour when he deployed it. He was also, in a way that Osamu had spent considerable energy not thinking about, extremely beautiful. Not loudly, not in any way that announced itself, but in the settled, certain way of someone who had simply always looked like that and saw no reason to make it anyone's problem. Osamu was aware that he had a crush on him in the same way he was aware of a bruise he kept accidentally pressing. Not constantly. Just whenever something reminded him of it, which was often enough to be inconvenient.
He had never said anything. He would not say anything. Akaashi was sharp and composed and edited manga for one of the biggest publishers in the country and moved through the world with a kind of effortless self-possession that Osamu associated with people who had options, who could afford to be selective, who did not end their days crying on kitchen floors. The idea of saying anything was not embarrassing so much as it was simply absurd, and Osamu had filed it away in the category of things he was not going to do and left it there.
What had happened instead, gradually, was something quieter and more sustainable. A friendship, or something close enough to one that the distinction did not much matter. When Osamu had announced the Tokyo opening in the group chat, Akaashi had sent a single message: finally. When the branch opened, he had appeared in the second month, on an unremarkable Tuesday afternoon, ordered umeboshi without looking at the menu, and taken the table nearest the window as if he had already decided it was his.
He came most afternoons after that. He brought manuscripts covered in pencil marks, or his notebook, or sometimes just himself and a particular expression that Osamu had learned to read as meaning the day had been long and the work had been difficult and he required approximately forty minutes of quiet before he could be a person again. On those days Osamu would set his order down without comment and leave him to it. On other days, when the shop was slow and the light was right and neither of them was buried in something urgent, they talked. About food, usually, to start with, and then about other things, work and the city and the small observations that accumulate when two people share the same corner of the world often enough. Akaashi had particular opinions about translation. He found Bokuto's energy genuinely exhausting in a way that was also clearly the deepest possible affection, and he spoke about him with a fond exasperation that Osamu recognised from his own relationship with Atsumu and that made him feel, each time, a small and uncomplicated warmth.
They were not best friends. They were not the kind of close that involved history and late-night phone calls and knowing each other's worst moments. But Akaashi could read Osamu's moods the way fluent readers absorb a sentence, without apparent effort, without being told what to look for. And Osamu knew, with equal precision, the particular set of Akaashi's shoulders that meant a deadline had eaten him alive, the way his responses grew shorter and more clipped when he was running on nothing, the exact point in the evening when he shifted from working to simply existing in a space that was not his apartment.
On those evenings Osamu would add an extra onigiri to his order without mentioning it. Tuna mayo, usually, because it was what Akaashi reached for when things were bad, whether or not he admitted things were bad. Akaashi would notice immediately, because he always noticed, and he would look up with an expression that mixed genuine gratitude with something that wanted very much to be objection, and he would say, quietly, that he had not ordered that.
Osamu would tell him it was on the house.
Akaashi would tell him that was not the point.
Osamu would tell him to eat it or leave it.
There would be a pause, dignified and slightly stiff, and then Akaashi would eat it. He never thanked Osamu directly. He always, the next time he came in, ordered one more item than usual and left quietly before Osamu could argue about the price. It was an entirely unnecessary and completely characteristic exchange that had repeated itself enough times by now to feel like something they owned together, a small private ritual that Osamu looked forward to more than he would ever admit.
The afternoon visits had become the fixed point his days organized themselves around. Something to look forward to. The one thing that still had some small warmth left in it.
Which was why today felt particularly bleak.
Akaashi had come in at his usual time, around seven, settled at his window table with his notebook and a cup of tea, and Osamu had watched him arrive from behind the counter and felt nothing. Not the small lift that his visits usually produced. Not even relief. Just the same flat grey nothing that had been spreading through him all week like weather moving in.
He had been polite. He had greeted him, taken his order, set his onigiri down at his table. He had looked at Akaashi's shoulders, which had the particular set that meant the day had been brutal, and he had thought about the extra onigiri, and he had not been able to make himself do it. He had not been able to do much of anything beyond the minimum required to keep standing. Akaashi had said something quiet and precise about the rain, and Osamu had agreed with it, and the conversation had not gone further than that, because Osamu did not have further to give right now. He was empty in a way he could not explain without also explaining everything else, and he could not explain everything else, so he had retreated behind the counter and stayed there, and Akaashi had worked and Osamu had worked and the gap between them, which was usually easy and companionable, had felt tonight like something more significant than distance.
Because this week had stripped him down to the studs.
The supplier issue in Osaka had taken three days to resolve and had involved more phone calls than he could accurately count and an emergency resourcing decision that he had made at eleven-thirty on a Wednesday night from his kitchen floor because he had simply sat down at some point and not gotten back up. The staffing dispute in Kyoto had required him to mediate between two people he had never met in person via video call while simultaneously running his Friday lunch service, and he had managed both things adequately, he thought, though he could not have said with certainty. The Kobe maintenance costs had been a number he was still trying to absorb. And then the reviews, a small cluster of negative ones, nothing catastrophic, nothing he had not dealt with before, but this week they had landed differently. This week he had read them in the back office at midnight and felt each one like a specific and personal indictment.
He had slept, across the entire week, perhaps fifteen hours.
By Friday evening his hands were not entirely steady. He noticed this when he was wrapping the last batch of onigiri before closing, the small tremor in his fingers that he could not quite suppress, and he pressed them flat against the counter for a moment and breathed and reminded himself that he had one more hour to get through. Just one hour. He could be a person for one more hour.
His staff moved around him in their careful, slightly too-considerate way that told him they had noticed too. He said nothing. They said nothing. The unspoken contract of professional dignity.
Akaashi gathered his things near closing time and came to the counter to say goodnight. He paused there for a moment, jacket half on, and looked at Osamu in that direct, unhurried way he had.
"Are you all right?" he asked.
It was a simple question. It should have been easy.
"Fine," Osamu said. "Just a long week."
Akaashi looked at him for a moment longer than the answer required. His expression was careful, and there was something in his eyes that Osamu recognized with a cold feeling in his chest as understanding, the particular understanding of someone who had already seen past the answer to what was underneath it. He felt the back of his neck flush. He dropped his gaze to the counter.
"Okay," Akaashi said quietly. Not convinced, but not pushing. He gathered the last of his things. "Goodnight, Osamu-kun."
"Goodnight," Osamu said.
The door chimed. The rain received him.
Osamu stared at the counter for a moment and then walked his last customers out the door, sent his staff home, and then stood alone in his shop in the silence. And the silence was very, very loud.
He moved through the closing routine by memory. Counters wiped, equipment switched off, stock checked and logged, back door secured. The motions of it were so familiar they required nothing from him, which was good, because he had nothing left to give them. He moved like a man underwater, slow and displaced from himself, each task completed at a slight remove from any actual engagement with it.
He was transferring the last of the rice containers to the cold storage when it happened.
He did not decide to sit down. His legs simply stopped cooperating. One moment he was standing at the shelving unit with a container in his hands and the next he was on the floor with his back against the cold metal and his knees pulled up and the container set carefully beside him, because even now, even this, some part of him made sure the rice was safe before he fell apart.
He sat there for a moment. The fluorescent lights hummed above him. The kitchen smelled like rice and disinfectant and the faint metallic cold of the storage units. His hands lay open in his lap.
Then the first sound came out of him, low and ugly and completely beyond his control.
He pressed his hand over his mouth but it did not help, it did not help at all, and within a few seconds he was crying properly, or not crying so much as coming undone, the sobs wrenching up from somewhere deep in his chest and shaking his whole body with them. He curled forward, shoulders hunching, and pressed his forehead to his knees, and cried in the way he had been not-crying for months, since somewhere around the third week in Tokyo when the adrenaline had run out and the reality of what he had built and what it had cost him had arrived like a bill he had been somehow not expecting.
He cried for the apartment above him and its bare walls and the silence it was full of. He cried for his mother's voice on the phone, asking if he was eating, asking if he was sleeping, and the lies he gave her in return. He cried for Atsumu, who called less often now because Osamu had trained him by degrees to call less often, had been too tired and too ashamed of his own tiredness to sustain the connection the way he should have. He cried for Atsumu and Sakusa in their apartment in Osaka, the strange and certain domesticity of them, someone to eat with, someone to come home to, something so ordinary and so entirely out of reach that he could not think about it without a sorrow so sharp it registered almost as physical pain.
He cried because he was twenty-seven years old and he had built four restaurants and the last time anyone had held him was so long ago he could not remember it without effort. Four years. More than four years. He had been twenty-two, maybe twenty-three, and it had not been love, had not been anything close to love, but there had been hands on him and warmth and the basic animalistic comfort of not being alone in his own body, and he had been too young and too busy to understand how much that mattered, and now he was here, on his kitchen floor, and he understood.
He was so lonely. The loneliness had weight and texture and temperature. It was not abstract. It lived in his chest and behind his eyes and in his hands, which had not held anything that wasn't rice or a cleaning cloth or a phone in longer than he could bear to think about. He was so lonely and so tired and so ashamed of both things that he could not speak about either of them to anyone, not even to Atsumu, not even to Akaashi, who probably already knew anyway and whom Osamu would rather have died than let see this, this, the broken-open mess of him on the floor of his own restaurant.
The sobs came in waves. He rode them because he had no choice.
He did not hear the door.
He heard nothing until the kitchen air shifted in the particular way it shifts when a room gains a presence, and he looked up from his knees, vision blurred, chest still heaving, and Akaashi was crouching in front of him.
He had come back.
Jacket still on. A notebook in his hand, which meant he had probably left it behind on the table. He was looking at Osamu, with an expression that was steady and unfrightened and entirely focused, and it did not look like the expression of a man who had simply returned for a forgotten object. There was a quality to it, a deliberateness, that Osamu was too wrecked to properly interpret but which registered somewhere beneath the wreckage of him as something important.
Osamu opened his mouth. Nothing came out. His face was wet and his breathing was ragged and there was nothing he could possibly say that would address any of this in a way that preserved any dignity whatsoever.
Akaashi set the notebook on the shelf beside them without looking at it.
Then he reached forward and put his arms around Osamu's shoulders, and pulled him in, and held him.
No preamble. No question. No careful negotiation of whether this was welcome. Just the warmth of another body, immediate and solid, and the weight of Akaashi's arms around him, and the completely involuntary sound that tore out of Osamu's chest in response, because he had not been held in so long that the sensation of it bypassed every defense he had left and went straight to the place in him that had been starving for exactly this.
His hands grabbed at Akaashi's shirt. He felt the fabric bunch between his fingers. He pressed his face against Akaashi's shoulder and cried in a way that he had not allowed himself to cry in front of another person since he was a child, broken and graceless and entirely beyond caring, because he had nothing left to protect himself with.
Akaashi held him. That was all. His hand moved in slow, steady circles against Osamu's back. His other hand rested at the back of his head. His breathing was calm and even and Osamu's body, despite everything, began very slowly to follow it, the way a smaller wave gradually resolves itself into the rhythm of the sea around it.
He did not say anything yet. He did not ask what was wrong or offer reassurances or tell Osamu he was going to be okay. He simply held him in the cold, humming quiet of the kitchen, and let him fall apart for as long as falling apart required.
Eventually the sobs thinned. They became shuddering breaths, and the shuddering breaths became something closer to stillness, and Osamu stayed where he was, forehead against Akaashi's shoulder, fingers still loosely tangled in his shirt, too emptied to move.
Outside, the rain kept falling.
"Take your time," Akaashi said, very quietly, into the space above his head.
And Osamu closed his eyes, and breathed, and did not let go.