Deadly|Kagehina

Chapter 1

When Hinata landed the night shift position at the local laundromat, he couldn’t believe his ears when the manager told him there had been no other applicants; surely someone else would have been enchanted by the idea. The people who frequent the night laundries must be interesting: desperate students toiling endlessly under a time crunch, struggling writers and insomniac artists, transients or fugitives on the run with with endless stories just waiting for an attentive ear - and he’d be right there to provide that service to them (along with a wide assortment of reasonably-priced fabric softeners).

The entire idea was just so… romantic! He couldn’t wait to meet all sorts of fascinating, potentially dangerous people.

But as the weeks passed him by, he slowly realized that maybe his new job wasn’t quite the fairytale he envisioned.

It wasn’t that the customers were awful, but they certainly weren’t interesting - and if they were, they weren’t exactly stoked on the idea of sharing their lives and stories with Hinata at two in the morning.

But… hey, sometimes he’d get the opportunity to show someone how to clean out a lint trap in a dryer! That’s something, right?

But that’s typically where the interactions would end.

And so, he eventually resigned himself to sitting quietly at the front desk, disheartened and lonely, scrolling through his phone or flipping through one of the garbage magazines that the customers left behind.

Sometimes he’d fill a couple pages in the coloring books stuck in the children’s corner - it’s not like they got any use, otherwise.

Even the smiles he’d greet the guests with started to lose their luster.

Until, eventually, he stopped smiling at them all together. It’s not like they smiled back.

They barely even looked at him.

Every shift was the same - the same boring night with the same boring, unfriendly people, the same magazine he’s been reading for three nights now, the same clock on the same beige wall that he’s been watching for weeks, just waiting for four o’clock to roll around so he can close up and shuffle home, the same—

“Hi.”

Hinata yelps, head snapping up from his tattered magazine so quickly he jolts on his stool. He grabs wildly at the counter to keep from toppling backwards.

“H-hi!” Hinata stammers a greeting, forcing a smile onto his weary face. He didn’t even hear the door jingle. But, there, standing… an odd several feet from the counter is a tall, young guy, probably close to Hinata’s age, with dark hair and a completely blank expression on his pale, tired face. The guy blinks slowly once, twice, and then again before… still not saying anything else.

“Um,” Hinata says, licking his lips, “can I help you?”

The guy blinks again.

A few more seconds pass with nothing but the quiet mechanical hum of fluorescent lights and dryers to break the awkward silence; but then, to Hinata’s immense relief, the guy parts his lips as if to speak. But he closes them again and drags his hazy eyes away from Hinata’s face, slowly strolling them around the laundromat.