Work Text:
There are a lot of important—no, vital—tasks that go into opening a restaurant: sourcing ingredients, stocking napkins, maintaining facilities.
The easiest task is finding a rice supplier. That one is a no- brainer. There’s only one source that he even bothers considering for his restaurant.
But then there are more difficult—much harder to pin tasks—that he saves for last: It is by no means a simple feat to find a good and sensible work shoe, if not the best and most comfortable footwear known to man.
Because how is he supposed to sell the best onigiri in the whole damn country if his feet, knees, and calves are on fire from wearing out his soles all day? What then?
“Osamu?” Suna’s voice wavers.
Osamu’s name sounds wrong falling off Suna’s tongue with that inflection.
Instinctively, he looks up.
“Suna?” The expression on Suna’s face can only be described as horror. Osamu’s heartbeat starts to pick up, his pulse racing as he desperately tries to figure out why Suna is looking at him like he’s not only a stranger, but a stranger whom he fears.
“Osamu.” Suna’s voice cracks and so does Osamu’s heart.
Osamu’s brand new, non-slip, Bistro Pro Crocs squeak as he takes a hesitant step forward, desperate to hold Suna in his arms and figure out just what the fuck is going on. But when Osamu steps forward, Suna steps back. Osamu’s heart drops.
“Osamu, you know—”
“Know what? Sunarin, what do I know?”
“You know we’re a Skechers family.” Suna winds up his arms then throws them forward, pointing to Osamu’s feet. “ What. Are. Those?”
“Huh? They’re my Crocs .”
“Fuck.” Suna pinches the bridge of his nose and starts pacing around the restaurant. “Fuck. What the fuck am I supposed to do here? Huh? Did you think about that, Osamu?”
“Yer not makin’ any sense, Suna. What are ya talkin’ about?”
“The shoes, Osamu. The shoes. You can’t just wear Crocs like they’re nothing. What part of ‘ we are a Skechers family’ did you not understand?”
Osamu looks from Suna to the shoes and back again. He knows Suna better than he knows anyone, better than he knows himself. Suna isn’t joking. What the fuck is he talking about? “They’re just shoes? They’re comfortable and have great support for the knees and lower back. Why does it matter?”
Suna stops in front of the window and runs a hand through his hair. His distraught expression is reflected in the glass and it fills Osamu with fear.
“I guess I have a choice to make then,” Suna says.
“What do ya—”
“Osamu.” Suna holds up a hand. “Please, I’m thinking. I need to think.” Suna starts pacing again. He wags a finger in the air like he’s mentally solving equations that Osamu can’t even begin to make sense of.
Osamu watches. He waits.
For Suna, he’d wait forever.
Suna comes to a halt in front of Osamu. He’s so close. Osamu wants to reach out, to hold his boyfriend in his strong, strong arms, and reassure him that everything will be okay.
His hand twitches.
“Alright,” Suna says. “Osamu, there is no one in this world that I will ever love more than you. This much I know is true. We may not be married but I love you in sickness and in health. I love you for rich or for poor. I love you in Skechers or in”—Suna’s pause is fleeting. Come and gone so quickly that everybody else would have missed it. But Osamu isn’t everybody else—”Crocs. ‘Til death do us part.”
“Sunarin, ya know I love ya too, right? I don’t know why we’re makin’ mountains out of mole hills.”
“Osamu! Look with your eyes! Your special eyes! Don’t you see? This love is forbidden! It was forbidden the moment you decided to put on those...those... abominations !” He spits the last word like just those letters alone are enough to burn him. Maybe they are.
“Forbidden?”
“God, Osamu! Get your head in the game! You—no, we—have to run away. No one can know what you did here tonight!”
Osamu doesn't have a fucking clue what is going on, but he loves and trusts Suna more than anyone else in this world. So it’s a no-brainer to agree to everything he says. He would follow Suna anywhere.
“Okay, so we’re running away then?”
“Yes! But listen to me, it has to be done secretly. If our families—if our friends knew—they’d object. They’d never let us be happy. This is the only way.”
“Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it. Ya know I will.”
Suna reaches for his hand and Osamu’s heart swells. Suna, for all he was horrified only minutes ago, isn’t going to leave him. They’ll be together, even if that means leaving everyone and everything behind them.
“I’ll meet you here tonight. Then we can run away together.”
“Why don’t we just run away now? No one else is even here?”
“That’s too logical, Osamu! We’re star-crossed lovers, not people with functioning brain cells.”
“So, tonight," Osamu says slowly, "we meet here?”
“Yes!” Suna pushes him toward the door. “Now go! Think of a convincing excuse and then I’ll meet you here at midnight on the dot.”
Osamu still has no fucking idea what’s going on but he nods his head and runs toward home.
He knows he isn’t supposed to tell anyone but Osamu calls Akagi anyway and word-vomits a summary of the situation in one rushed breath.
“Well, that’s fuckin’ wild,” Akagi says when Osamu is done. “You’ll have to fake yer death, of course.”
“hUH?”
“It’s the only way you and Suna will be able to live together in peace. After all, Osamu, ya know as well as I do that at Inarizaki, we are a Sketchers family. You’ll be burned at the stake for this.”
“Did I miss the fuckin’ Skechers memo in high school? Wait, we aren’t in high school anymore. Why does it matter?”
“Ya were probably too busy lookin’ at Suna to notice the Skechers memo, and YES IT MATTERS! What would Kita say if he heard ya were wearing—” Akagi’s voice drops to a whisper. “If he knew ya were wearing Cr*cs.”
“Wait.” Osamu holds up a hand. “Did ya just censor the word Cro-”
Akagi slaps a hand over Osamu’s mouth. “Don’t say it. Just listen.”
Osamu nods.
“Tonight, take this.” He presses a vial into Osamu’s hand. There are so many questions running through Osamu’s head. What is it? Where the fuck did Akagi get it? And, why?
But all that comes out of his mouth is one ineloquent “huh?”
“Just take it,” Akagi insists.
“I’m not takin’ anything until ya tell me what it is.” Osamu lowers his voice. “Tell it to me straight, Akagi-san. Is it drugs? Because I’m not sure I should take anythin’ when we’re tryin’ to run away.”
Akagi fixes him with a look that screams ‘ you’re an idiot.’ “It will slow down your heart beat until it’s undetectable. Everyone will think you’ve died but when the elixir wears off, you’ll wake up and then you can run away with Suna and live your happily ever after.”
Osamu takes the vial, thanks Akagi, and disappears into the hot afternoon sun.
A frantic phone call. And running. Running. Running.
A pounding heart.
Suna bursts into the Miya household to find Osamu lax on the floor, eyes unseeing, and cradled in Atsumu’s arms.
Suna’s heart shatters.
A funeral procession.
Suna looks toward the sky. A tear pools at the corner of his eye. “It’s raining,” he says to nobody in particular.
“There ain’t a cloud in the sky, Suna.” Kita gives him a reassuring pat on the back. The tear falls.
“No, it’s raining.”
A duel. Komori against Atsumu. They both fall.
(And then they get back up and shake it off because they do have brain cells and can agree that the mistakes of their friends aren’t theirs to iron out via weak-willed volleyball wars.)
Suna waits outside the Miya family tomb. Now it really is raining. Somehow he finds the energy to stand and the strength to push his way inside. Osamu lays there, unmoving, though just as beautiful in death as he was in life. Suna’s heart hurts. All of this because of those no good, dirty, rotten, mother effing cr*cs.
Suna raises the knife he nicked from Onigiri Miya. If he can’t be with Osamu in life, then at least they can be together in death.
“Goodbye, sweet prince,” Suna mutters. Then he plunges the dagger toward his chest—
A sudden movement.
The knife clatters onto the cold stone floor.
Osamu.
Osamu . Alive.
“Sunarin, what the fuc—”
Suna surges forward and throws his arms around Osamu’s neck. Osamu catches him with an “oof.”
“ Osamu. ” He buries his face into the crook of Osamu’s neck and sighs.
“Sunarin.”
“I thought—I..I...” He can’t say it. The thought that he lost Osamu is still too fresh. But it’s Osamu, so he doesn’t need to say anything for him to know.
Osamu draws his arms tighter around Suna. “I’m right here.” He waggles his feet. “Crocs and all.”
Suna nods. Osamu is here. He’s safe. They both are.
“Ya want to get out of here? We still gotta finish out our plan.”
“Oh, that reminds me.” Suna rifles through his bag, forgotten about until now. He pulls out a pair of neon yellow Crocs.
A tear wells up in Osamu’s eye. He sniffles. “Sunarin,” he says, reverent. “Ya got yerself some Crocs?”
Suna throws aside his Skechers then slips his feet into the vibrant rubber clogs. “EJP colors.”
Osamu’s face splits into a grin. “They’re perfect.” He holds out a hand to Suna. “Are ya ready for our happily ever after?”
Suna nods. A happily ever after with Osamu, even if that includes Crocs, sounds pretty damn good to him.