[satosugu] saturday night live || moonlilies

((╯ರ ~ ರ)╯︵ ┻━┻

8:00 AM 〚2 September, 2017〛

Suguru has a shift. It's terrible.

Satoru sends him a text saying 'im here at the airport :^) utahime is going 2 murder me lol'. He responds with, 'ask shoko to play with ur cadaver when she does and gets nothing back.' Maybe the bastard got murdered after all.

He feels terrible. No, that's not it. It feels like—like—

He doesn't know what it feels like. Satoru's leaving for three months and all he could do to say goodbye wasn't even worth everything else they've done to say hello.

That's not even the worst part; it was that Satoru had been okay with it and had said nothing about it. Suguru knows full well that that isn't normal for Satoru but he didn't ask. Won't ask.

No, maybe this was worse: he tried to get a leave but wasn't allowed to, and God knows he can't get fired from his job. He'd been told that Satoru "wasn't family" as if he fucking had any left. As if Satoru hadn't been family for more years than he could count, as if anybody else but him and Shoko have given a real shit about him in the most recent dregs of his godforsaken life.

So here he is. He's in front of a counter trying to add money with the back room right behind him smelling like fresh vomit because some bastard coworker of his got piss drunk and clocked in for ten minutes before passing out. Who even gets drunk at eight in the morning?

Still, he finds it in the bottom of his heart to help his coworker stand and call a contact to pick him up. He's assaulted with small talk by said coworker while waiting but that's fine; he's Getou Suguru, Master of Arts in Small Talk.

It begins like this:

"You come 'ere of'n?" (u come here often)

"Yes," Suguru says, wiping the counter that his coworker was currently almost sprawled entirely on. "I'm employed here."

His coworker's—Yukio, Suguru registers as he sees the nametag hanging on for dear life at the vomit-stained shirt in front of him—head is doing some funny thing. "Mmm. Aren' ya that...eng'neering guy?(engineering) With th'—hic—research?"

Suguru pauses. "We go to the same school?" Everyone does research in Waseda.

Yukio laughs at this. "Yeah—hic—haha. You an' that ast..astr...ast—hic—rophysics guy?" (astrophysics) He gestures drunkenly at his hair. "One with th' white hair? Shades?"

Suguru doesn't look up. "Yeah?"

"You guys a thing?"

He suppresses whatever it is that wells inside him. "Yeah."

Yukio laughs. "Cool."

Someone picks Yukio's sorry ass up after three more minutes of the Q&A, at which point Suguru feels like he's gone through a whole thesis defense. He'll definitely tell Satoru about this asshole once he gets home.

Oh. Right.

He'll text Satoru about it, then.

The rest of the shift is uneventful save for the occasional customer, and Suguru catches a few minutes of sleep in between the intermittent jingles of the door being opened. He smiles his best smile at everyone as usual and they all smile back at him. It's only a few minutes after he beams at his fifth customer does he notice that there's a thin track of dried drool at the corner of his mouth.

That's okay. Honest mistakes, you know.

He gets home at exactly 12:30, crashes on the couch, and expects to hear Satoru grumbling behind him. That last part doesn't come.