Chapter Text
Shinkai sighed, putting his phone away in his pocket as he walked across campus. Their university had many computer labs but his friend Fukutomi Juichi seemed to favour one in particular, leaving Shinkai with no choice but to waste a few precious minutes getting from one side of his school to the other.
It was a beautiful day and the quad was full of students. Although late April meant lots of rain, students were spotted sitting leisurely on the damp grass, not caring if their pants were getting wet. Shinkai felt a small smile tug at his lips as he imagined the group of guys sitting under the tree ahead of him standing up, sporting wet, grassy stains on their asses.
He quickly composed himself as two professors walked by, doing his best not to look crazy laughing to himself. He gave them a polite nod before returning his gaze to the field, noting that others were casually playing soccer or simply standing around idly chatting away. Another sigh escaped his lips as he successfully made it past the quad, walking through the building's main entrance. Shinkai immediately felt his mood drop as he entered the dark vestibule.
It's such a perfect day to go biking and I'm stuck working on fucking biochem. Shinkai sulked, turning left in the hallway towards his destination.
Advanced Biochemistry was definitely not his best subject, which is why he had asked Juichi to help him with his report. Okay, he not so much asked as he did beg. Basically anything with calculations left Shinkai confused and frustrated, no matter how hard he worked on them. Although Juichi was his lab partner, reports were to be done individually, resulting in Shinkai doing horribly on his last lab. His friend had agreed to work with him, which was why Shinkai was now on his way to the depressing, fruit-fly infested computer lab instead of outside, enjoying the crisp summer weather.
You're in your third year of university Hayato. Your marks should be improving not getting worse, dumbass. He scolded himself as he walked through the double doors of the computer lab. Now was definitely not the time to feel sorry for himself. He had to work hard if he wanted to do well, no excuses.
Just like Juichi had texted, a wild patch of blond hair could be spotted to his right as he walked towards the computers. Shinkai was so dead set on approaching his friend that he hadn't noticed another figure quickly walking in the opposite direction.
The impact was surprisingly forceful considering the fact that the person he hit seemed more gangly than muscular. Their shoulders had collided sharply, causing Shinkai to spin a full 180°, facing the stranger in question.
“What the FUCK do you-”
“I’m so sorr-”
“-mean it’s due at 9?”
“What?”
Shinkai observed the raven haired boy, completely bewildered. The boy in question looked back at Shinkai, quickly patting him hard on the shoulder twice.
“Sorry buddy, you alright?” He asked, barely waiting for Shinkai to respond before re-approaching his friend across the room, yelling an “I thought we had ‘til fucking midnight what the FUCK”.
Shinkai watched him freak out for another thirty seconds before snapping out of it. He turned to look back at Juichi, who hadn’t witnessed the scene unfold. His classmate had his headphones on as he typed away on the school’s computer, bobbing his head slightly to the beat of his music. Shinkai tapped his friend on the shoulder, smiling when Juichi looked up at him.
Juichi merely nodded to Shinkai, and then the computer beside him, indicating that the seat was saved for him. “Thanks.” Shinkai said as he grabbed Juichi’s backpack from the seat, setting it gently on the floor beside Fukutomi as he sat down.
“Sorry I couldn’t find us better seats” Juichi said gruffly, pausing his music and taking his headphones off.
“What do you mean? These seats are fine.” Shinkai said, looking around the lab.
Indeed, most students ended up going for the computers with the huge tables so that they could comfortably lay all their papers/textbooks/fucking meals out without having a crowded workspace. The students who were regulars in this lab would go as far as scattering some of their papers on the table, logging into the computer and playing 10 hour videos on youtube just so that they could reserve their computer while attending class, without worrying about being automatically logged off due to inactivity.
“Because of a certain noisy individual.” Juichi grumbled, looking past Shinkai to the person beside him. Just as Shinkai turned around did the black haired boy return, sitting in the seat directly left of Shinkai. The boy had been muttering curses under his breath as he quickly typed away on his computer before suddenly getting up, startling Shinkai.
“Kin-chan did you fucking know about this?” He asked the boy sitting on the opposite side of his computer. Kin-chan sighed, looking up at his classmate from his cubicle, adjusting his slightly askew glasses.
“Everybody knew Arakita. Now quiet down and get to work. You’re disturbing the people around you.”
The black haired boy, no, Arakita, sat down with a huff. From this angle, Shinkai could see that his eyebrows were creased and a deep frown was sporting his face. Suddenly, he turned to Shinkai, startling the red-head again with his abrupt movements.
“My bad, was I being loud?” He asked, his long bangs covering his forehead, making his expression look more scrutinizing than sorry.
“Nah.” Shinkai said, shaking his head. “I just got here.” He pointed at his computer, which had yet to be logged into.
“Hmm” Arakita had said absentmindedly, staring at Shinkai. Shinkai couldn’t help but look back, not wanting to lose the staring contest he didn’t know he signed up for. Just as promptly as it started, though, did it end, Arakita turning back to his assignment with not so much as a second glance.
What the fuck just happened? Shinkai wondered, also turning to his computer, quickly typing his school I.D. and password, then turning to Juichi as he waited for his computer to load. His blond friend was looking at him, one strong eyebrow raised, silently asking Shinkai- what was up with that exchange? Shinkai just shrugged, turning back to his computer, suddenly feeling very self conscious. What was up with that exchange? He quickly peeked to his left, only to see that his neighbour was looking right back at him.
“Are those blue streaks?” He asked, his expression serious but his voice amused.
“Y-yeah..?” Shinkai stuttered.
Immediately was he mad at himself for sounding nervous. It wasn’t like him to lose his composure, especially to a stranger, so he instinctively gave the other boy a wink and a finger gun. “You like?”
Now that had been unexpected. For both him and Arakita, apparently, whose pale face turned a shade darker.
“It’s fucking wild, that’s for sure.” He muttered, pretending to be busy with whatever was on his computer screen. Before Shinkai could say anything else, the boy from across the room who Arakita had approached initially, was by his side, poking his friend in the back of the head.
“Hey fuckass, did you finish question 4 yet?” He asked, the bags under his eyes an indication of how tough their assignment most likely was.
“No shitdick, I’m barely starting 3.” Arakita responded, violently slapping his hand away. His eyes still glued to his screen.
“Well hurry the fuck up. I’m exhausted and starving.”
“Then leave! I basically lost 3 hours off this shitty assignment because somebody decided to keep the deadline a secret from their friend!” Arakita exclaimed, his voice rising what felt like an octave per word.
Suddenly, Shinkai felt something prodding his side. He turned to Juichi’s stern gaze.
“If they’re distracting you, we can relocate.” Shinkai quickly shook his head, turning to his screen to download and open his rough lab report before speaking again.
“Okay, I’m ready. Shall we start?” He asked, a smile on his face although his brain screamed for him to just give up and take an undeserved break. Arakita was both entertaining and mesmerizing, and he wanted to keep watching the boy beside him. Before he could question his own trail of thought, he heard Juichi let out a small sound of affirmation while opening his own assignment. His friend definitely seemed to feel the exact opposite as Shinkai in regards to their noisy neighbour.
“The sooner we finish this, the sooner we can get away from them.” Juichi mumbled, taking out his calculator and a rough sheet of paper.
***
It took Shinkai almost three hours to feel confident enough in his own knowledge before letting his friend go.
“Thanks again Juichi,” He expressed, watching his stone faced friend pack up. “It’s a lot clearer now.”
“No problem Shinkai, text me if you need anything”
Shinkai merely smiled and nodded, waving at Juichi’s back as his friend made his way for the exit. He had more or less completed his lab report, telling Shinkai that he’d “finish the rest at home,” his stern gaze looking past Shinkai to their noisy neighbour. Shinkai had laughed at that, but now that he was alone did he feel his self control waver. He looked at the boy beside him, who had had his third emotional breakdown and was now cradling his head in his arms.
While working on his lab report, Shinkai had ended up learning bits and pieces about the raven haired beside him. Arakita was an engineering student in his third year, working on an assignment that had been worth quite a bit considering that it was only 8 questions. Shinkai didn’t need to look at their work to see how troublesome the assignment was. That, and the fact that Arakita had been pretty vocal about it.
That was another thing he had learned about the napping boy. He was loud. He was constantly voicing his opinion about the assignment, which was negative by the way, using a plethora of inappropriate words and occasional hand gestures to get the message across to whoever seemed to be within hearing range. His two friends Kinjou and Machimiya had been helping each other on the questions, but had ended up completing and printing their assignments 30 minutes ago, leaving the computer lab to hand in their reports.
Shinkai gently prodded at Arakita’s elbow, making him turn his head to glare at whoever dared interrupt his 4 minute nap.
“You alive?” Shinkai asked, surprised at himself for trying to strike a conversation when he knew what he should have been doing instead was working on his own paper and getting the fuck out of there. He was starving.
“Hmhjdhgsd” Arakita answered, muffling his painful groan in his sweater/makeshift pillow.
“Don’t you only have like, 20 minutes to finish?” Shinkai asked, nodding towards Arakita’s screen, a polite smile on his lips.
“Don’t you only have like, 20 seconds to shut up?” He responded, half-heartedly raising a fist at Shinkai, clearly fed up with the torture.
Shinkai laughed at that, watching the boy sit up, rub his eyes, and get back to typing.
Something else Shinkai had learned about Arakita was that he was surprisingly smart, despite his mean looks and rude mannerisms. He had constantly pointed out faults in Machimiya’s and Kinjou’s work, helping them with equations and explaining clearly how they should approach each problem whenever they were stuck. The only reason why he was still working on his own assignment while the other two had gone to hand theirs in was because he wanted his answers to be perfect. Although his classmates had gotten to that “fuck it” stage every university student experiences about an hour before a deadline, Arakita was determined that he could still finish the assignment properly and make it on time if he left 10 minutes before 9.
“I’m definitely cutting it close.” He grumbled switching tabs to look something up.
Shinkai went back to his own work after he was satisfied that Arakita wasn’t going to pass out again. Why am I so concerned? He thought as he tried to get back into the flow of his own assignment. His question went unanswered as his stomach grumbled for what felt like a solid four minutes. Staring back at his report, Shinkai realized it was a lot easier than he had initially thought. Calculating the relative mobility of his proteins wasn’t hard, but had he needed Juichi with him so they could agree on which blobs in their gel image could be considered their protein bands. Now that things were settled, the rest of his lab was simple enough. If not for the distracting boy beside him, Shinkai probably would have finished an hour prior.
Shinkai was just finishing typing up one of his figure captions when he saw Arakita run to the printers, with 7 minutes remaining until his deadline. Shinkai didn’t have a chance to turn back to his work before he saw the boy run back, a string of curse words escaping his thin lips.
“Hey, shit, do you have money on your card?” He shook Shinkai’s shoulder roughly, looking at his watch then his computer screen, opening up facebook.
“Yeah…?” Shinkai was already mentally calculating how much this was going to cost him. Their school had I.D. cards that could be loaded with money to spend on campus stores and services. It was pretty useful, but loading the card was troublesome, as putting in ¥ 500 was the minimum and the machines didn’t accept change, even if you only needed like ¥ 10 to print out a page.
“Okay, what’s your facebook?” Arakita asked, snapping Shinkai out of his mental ramble.
“What?”
Arakita scoffed. “It’s gonna be pretty hard printing my assignment on your computer if you don’t actually posses said assignment, buddy.”
Shinkai did his best to keep his face neutral as he logged into his facebook, but he felt his lips twitch up.
“The name’s Arakita Yasutomo, by the way.” He said, still standing, hovering over his keyboard.
“I’m Shinkai Hayato, nice to meet you.”
“Don’t fucking introduce yourself 3 hours after we’ve met, idiot. Add me so I can send you this shit.” Yasutomo was definitely in panic mode. Only a minute had passed but he was cutting it extremely close. It would be such a waste if he lost 10% just because he was a few minutes late handing in the physical copy. Shinkai quickly found Yasutomo and clicked add friend. Not a second later did he get a notification saying the friend request was accepted, and then another notification indicating that someone had sent him a message in chat. Before he could even click the icon, Yasutomo had reached over, grabbing Shinkai’s mouse and his hand along with it.
Shinkai felt his face heat up as he wrestled his hand out from under Yasutomo’s grasp. The engineer-to-be hadn’t seemed to notice how close they were, how his shoulder was brushing Shinkai’s cheek, how exposed his pale neck was to Shinkai. All he seemed to care about was quickly downloading his files and making sure to print under the right setting before taking off towards the printers again.
“Hey dumbass! You coming or not?” He shouted from across the room.
Shinkai quickly got up and half jogged to the other side of the room, forgetting that Yasutomo needed him to put in his I.D. and password in order to print his assignment. 16 pages later and about ¥ 130 less in his card did Shinkai feel his shoulders shaken violently as Yasutomo expressed his thanks, stapling his assignment and running out of the lab.
“I’ll be back soon,” he screamed over his shoulder, running down the hall. “Watch my stuff!”
And with that he was gone, turning the corner without so much as a second glance. Shinkai slowly walked back to his computer, looking at the time displayed at the bottom corner of his screen. Yasutomo had 3 minutes to get to the engineering building, which was about a 5 minute walk away.
He better make it, after all that trouble he put me through. Shinkai thought, staring at Yasutomo’s shit-eating grin displayed on his facebook chat.
Shinkai sighed, clicking on the profile picture, enlarging it. Yasutomo had a mischievous smile on his face, his arm wrapped around the shoulder of someone whose body had been cut off in the photo. His bangs were shorter in the picture then they were now, but he more or less looked the same. Shinkai realized that he had been smiling to himself and quickly closed the tab. His thoughts were all over the place, but he could distinctly come to the conclusion that Arakita Yasutomo had hit him like a hurricane.