Kazunari means to get back to work after that, he really does, but when he hits the locker room, he looks at his work gear and just can't quite bring himself to put it back on. He aches all over and isn't that hard up for money. The hell with it—it won't kill anybody if he knocks off early for the night.
The crowd downstairs hasn't begun to thin at all; Kazunari has to fight to get to the bar and fend off a few friendly overtures while he's at it. Takes Nijimura a while to work his way over, too, once he gets there. Nijimura is about as blasé as they come, so he only raises his eyebrows at Kazunari's street clothes. "Changing your approach?"
Kazunari pushes the house cut across the bar. "I'm going home."
Nijimura pockets the money without breaking eye contact. "That so?"
"Yeah." Kazunari waits for him to object to that—a part of him hopes that Nijimura will, will give him an excuse to—to—he doesn't even know what he wants an excuse to do.
Nijimura fails to oblige him and simply nods. "We'll see you after exams," he says and turns back to pouring drinks for the clamoring crowd.
"Right," Kazunari says after a moment, feeling curiously let down by Nijimura's indifference, and turns to make his way back through the crowd.
It makes a lot more sense when he gets out back and finds Shou-chan slouched against the wall beside his bike, smoking a cigarette and lying in wait for him. Kazunari stops short when he sees Shou-chan in the dirty orange glow that comes from the light over the back door. "I thought you quit."
Shou-chan exhales a stream of smoke and shrugs. "Some nights just call for a smoke, you know?" He raises the cigarette to his lips and lets it dangle there while he digs a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket and offers it to Kazunari in silence.
"It's a filthy habit," Kazunari tells him, taking a cigarette anyway.
"Best kind of habits to have." Shou-chan produces a lighter for him and lights him up. He waits for Kazunari to raise the cigarette to his lips and take that first breath of smoke before saying anything else. "Well?"
It's been so long since he's had a cigarette that the first hit of nicotine punches through Kazunari like a shot of adrenaline. Filthy habit or not, it helps clear some of the dull, exhausted feeling that's been wrapped around him for the past few days. He'll pay for it later, during the let down and the cravings for another cigarette, but for now Kazunari welcomes it. "It's over."
"Ah." Shou-chan nods and takes a drag off his cigarette. He exhales the smoke slowly. "Thought that might be the case." He doesn't say anything about the overcoat Kazunari's wearing—it really is a lot warmer than his old jacket, even if the cuffs of the sleeves hang almost to his fingertips—but Kazunari sees him look it over. Instead of remarking on that, he says, "Knew a guy once." Kazunari figures it only seems like it's at random. "Back when I was younger and sweeter than I am now." Shou-chan leans his head back against the brick wall behind him and looks up at the night sky, though there's nothing to see thanks to all the light pollution. "I thought the world of him before it was all said and done, though he didn't really deserve it." He smiles up at the sky, crooked and reminiscent. "He was a mean little bastard, matter of fact. But I still think about him sometimes, even though I know now that he was only ever playing with me." He lowers his eyes again and takes a last drag off his cigarette. "Hurts like hell at first, but it'll ease off. Just takes some time, but then, most things do."
Kazunari laughs at that, sort of. "You know I've had boyfriends before, right?" He knows how breakups go, for crying out loud.
"I know that." Shou-chan doesn't seem to be offended that his little trip down memory lane isn't moving Kazunari. "But there's boyfriends and then there's boyfriends. It's the ones that could mean something if things were just a little different that hit the hardest." He shrugs. "Which is how it just goes, I guess."
Sometimes Shou-chan is just too damn perceptive. Kazunari drops what's left of his cigarette and crushes out with his shoe. "I'm going home. Might as well get some more studying in while I still can."
"You'd probably do better to get good and rested." Shou-chan grins when Kazunari flips him off. "But what the hell do I know?"
"I wonder," Kazunari grunts, brushing past him and throwing his leg over his bike.
Shou-chan snorts and drops a hand on his shoulder for a quick squeeze. "Hang in there," he says. He heads back inside the bar without giving Kazunari a chance to reply.
He's always preferred to compartmentalize whenever possible, so Kazunari throws himself into his exams as much for their own sake as for a reason not to think about other things. Once he's in the middle of them, there's no room for nerves or regrets, which is just the way he wants it. After all's said and done, he doesn't even feel too pessimistic about his chances—that's probably not just the adrenaline and exhaustion talking, either. Of course, by that point, he feels like a rag that's been wrung out, so it's not like he can do much real thinking at all.
So he plants himself in his bed and sleeps twelve hours straight. He would have managed to sleep even longer than that if it weren't for his stomach and his bladder; once he's attended to the necessities he goes straight back to bed. For a couple of days, that's the sum and total of his existence, which is pretty standard even for the semesters when he doesn't have to haul ass to make up for being struck down by the flu. After the stupor begins to lift and he starts to be able to act like a human being again, it's time to do all the things he's been letting slide, like the dishes and his laundry and stopping in to have dinner with his family.
He does all these things without thinking much about Shintarou—hurrah for a strong skill in being able to ignore the shit he just doesn't want to deal with—and thinks he's doing rather well until his mother touches his elbow and draws him into the kitchen under the guise of sending leftovers home with him. "Is everything all right?" she asks while she fills a plastic container with curry.
Kazunari shrugs. "Nothing will be all right until I find out how I did on my exams." The waiting is the hardest part. Well, the hardest part aside from actually taking the damn things.
"Mm." That's never a good sound coming from his mother; Kazunari's very familiar with the way she utters it right before pinning his latest mischief on him. Sure enough, presently she says, "Are you sure? You seem like something has been bothering you."
"Nope, just my exams," Kazunari tells her.
She seals up the tub of curry and looks at him; these days she has to tilt her head back to do it, but it still makes him want to squirm with guilt even when he hasn't done anything wrong. She presses her lips together and shakes her head. "When you're ready to tell me about it, you know where to find me," she says at last.
Kazunari scoffs, fairly sure she's not fooled by it. "Of course I do, but really, there's nothing to tell." What's done is done. When there's no going back, there's no point in dwelling on it. Better to look forward.
His mother rolls her eyes and shoves the tub of curry into his hands. "We'll see you on Sunday," she tells him. "Remember what I said."
"Of course, Kaasan," Kazunari promises.
She probably knows that he's lying, but she lets it go at that.
No one says anything about Shintarou when Kazunari heads back to work, not even Shou-chan, for which Kazunari is grateful. If everyone else is willing to forget the whole thing, he is totally on board with that plan. It saves him a lot of grief, to be honest, so Kazunari gets himself all dolled up and then gets busy coaxing clients upstairs. Lucky for him, there are always willing clients looking for a good time. Business is good; he comes in even on the nights he doesn't usually work, aiming to make up for all the time he's taken off in the past few weeks, and doesn't really have the spare time to hang out at the bar to kibitz with Shou-chan or the other part-timers who work the nights he usually doesn't, let alone the new guys who are making a trial of the working boy's life. (Normally he'd find time for the last, if only so he can gossip with Shou-chan about who's going to stick around and who isn't, but if he's honest, Kazunari just isn't terribly interested in having long conversations with anyone right now.) In fact, some nights Kazunari barely has the time to pause for a drink between trips upstairs, and his take at the end of the week is substantial even after he subtracts the house cut from it.
He's also worn out by the end of the week, but that stands to reason, doesn't it? Of course it does. Hooking really only sounds easy in the abstract; in the concrete, it takes a lot of energy to keep up with the clients. But being tired is good; being tired means a growing bank account balance and a comfortable haze of exhaustion to anesthetize his brain enough to keep him from worrying about his exam scores. He must be doing better, because his mother doesn't ask him any more awkward questions at Sunday dinner.
Kazunari starts the second week of his vacation in a fairly positive frame of mind (except for the lingering question of his exam scores). If anything, it's an even busier week than the last, just the way Kazunari likes it. By the time he sees the last client out Saturday night, he's bone-tired, practically numb with it, and all he can really think about is how good it's going to be to get home, showered, and into his own bed.
Naturally, Shou-chan chooses this occasion to be hanging out at the bar when Kazunari goes down to turn the house cut over to Nijimura. He's helping close things down, in fact, piling up empty glasses for their trip back to the kitchen, but he leaves off doing that when he sees Kazunari come downstairs. "There you are."
Kazunari eyes him warily while he pushes the money across the bar to Nijimura. "Here I am, yeah."
"You've been a difficult man to talk to lately." Shou-chan hands the tray off to Nijimura, who unloads the glassware into a plastic tub that he hauls up onto his hip and carries off to the kitchen.
Kazunari shrugs at him. "Well, you know me, I've got customers to keep happy."
"I noticed that." Shou-chan looks him over—doesn't even try disguising that he's doing it, either. "You're looking a little ragged around the edges."
"It's been a busy week," Kazunari tells him, more short with him than is probably wise, but hell. He's tired. "I'm ready to go home and sack out, to be honest."
"Yeah, I figured." Shou-chan leans over the bar and swipes one of the towels from the bleach bucket to begin wiping the bar down. "You know there are other jobs, right?"
Kazunari looks at him—bent over the bar, apparently wholly absorbed in mopping up the sticky remains of spilled drinks—and rubs a hand over his face. "Yeah, sure, I know that. What's your point?" He likes this job, which is congenial to his schedule and his bank account.
Shou-chan glances at him, sidelong, and turns his attention back to his work. "Just making sure. Have a good night."
"…right," Kazunari says. "Later." He puzzles over Shou-chan's point all the way home and until he falls asleep, but can't figure out what motivated him to make it. It's not like he's in any danger of repeating the mistake he made with Shintarou with any of his other clients, after all.
Exam scores finally go up the Monday after his weird little conversation with Shou-chan. Kazunari prepares himself for the worst and goes to check them out; he's infinitely relieved to see that he's actually passed all his exams, some of them with flying colors.
That puts an end to his coursework, finally, and clears him to start his clinical clerkship. That's a heck of a relief, one less thing to worry about, and rates a celebratory round before his shift that evening. As far as Kazunari's concerned, the week is off to a great start.
Shou-chan finally makes sense to him late Thursday night, while Kazunari's got a client all over him, balls deep inside him and mumbling drunkenly into his ear as he does a piss-poor job of groping him. The guy's so smashed that he can't even keep Kazunari's name straight—he keeps call him Kazuya, for fuck's sake. Not that it really matters what the johns call him, but something inside Kazunari snaps when the guy groans, "Oh, fuck, Kazuya," as he shudders and comes. Maybe it's how tired he is, or how difficult it's been lately to keep focused on catering to his clients' fantasies and egos, or maybe it's just that this guy is too drunk to be considerate and Kazunari was already sore before he brought him upstairs. Whatever it is, suddenly he can't bear having the guy's weight over him for even one more second. He gets his hands between them, planting them in the middle of the guy's chest and shoving until he rolls off. Kazunari wriggles free the second he's able to, rolling off the bed and breathing hard.
The john raises his head, bleary and confused. "Dude, what the fuck?"
"We're done here," Kazunari says. His fingers itch to go for the wet wipes so he can scrub every last trace of the night's work from his skin, but he's not going to do it with this guy still in the room. "Get dressed, it's time to go."
The guy—Kazunari can't even remember this one's name, he's fucked so many people over the past few weeks—struggles upright, outrage dawning on his face. "Hey, I'm paying you for this."
"And you've got what you paid for," Kazunari tells him. "Now go."
"What the fuck is wrong with you?" The john is drunk enough that he doesn't know whether to be angry or confused, so he does both. "Why are you being such a bitch all of a sudden?"
It's actually a good question; Kazunari would like to know the answer to that, too. Sadly, he doesn't have one handy. "It's that time of the month. Look, would you just get your pants on and leave me alone?"
"Fine," the guy spits, "but you'd better not expect me back."
Kazunari could almost laugh—does this guy think he cares about that?—but he doesn't. He just stands well back while the guy ties off the condom and cleans up before fumbling his way back into his jeans. He slams the door on his way out; Kazunari doesn't even realize he's been holding his breath until he releases it.
He's in the middle of scrubbing himself clean when Shou-chan taps on the door and lets himself in without waiting for an answer. He doesn't say anything when he sees what Kazunari's doing; he just closes the door and leans against it until Kazunari snaps, "What?" He tosses one soiled wipe into the trashcan and reaches for another.
Shou-chan folds his arms across his chest. "Why don't you tell me? There's a fellow downstairs bending Shuuzou's ear about poor customer service."
Great. Just great. Kazunari scowls and casts around for his underwear—oh, right, his drunken client had felt like being macho. He loses more pairs of panties that way. "I didn't want him hanging around to bask in the afterglow, so I told him to leave."
"Uh-huh." It's fairly clear that Shou-chan does not feel that this is all there is to the story.
"Yeah." Kazunari tugs his dress back into order and tosses the panties into the trash, too. "He didn't like that very much, I guess."
Shou-chan snorts. "It seems not." He waits until Kazunari meets his eyes. "I wasn't going to say anything until you figured it out for yourself, but I don't think that's going to be happening any time soon."
This doesn't sound like it's going to be a fun conversation at all. "Figure out what?" Kazunari ask, guarded.
Shou-chan sighs and shakes his head, but his tone is kind, which is an even worse sign. "It's time to stop, Kazunari."
Kazunari stares at him. "Stop what?" He thinks he may know, though. Shou-chan's already given him a hint; he just hasn't picked up on it till now.
"What do you think?" Shou-chan's actually being pretty patient for someone who never enjoys having to explain the obvious. "Your head's a mess right now, and this isn't a job that's safe to do when you're not thinking straight. I know you know that."
Kazunari does, though that doesn't mean anything. "I'm fine."
"Bullshit. You've been working your ass off because you don't like thinking about the guy you can't have." Shou-chan shakes his head when Kazunari tries to protest. "I've known you for what, five years? Six? I think I know what I'm talking about by this point."
"No, you don't," Kazunari mutters. "I'm fine. I don't even think about Shintarou anymore."
"Oh, sure, and it's just a coincidence that you've been nailing every tall, classy guy with glasses who comes through the door. Please."
"I have not!" Kazunari says. Shou-chan stares at him. "Really, I haven't."
"Please," Shou-chan says again. "I've been in fear for my own virtue for days now. And your dissatisfied customer downstairs is tall, expensive, and looks a lot like our dear departed friend Shin-chan. Give it up, brat, you're in too deep to see what you've been doing with yourself."
Kazunari stares at Shou-chan, who looks back, level and serious in spite of the levity. "Fuck," he says. Fuck, Shou-chan may be an asshole in how he does it, but he's never not looked after their best interests, in his own sarcastic way. If he's bothered enough by what he's seeing to intervene like this, he must be worried. And he's never once given Kazunari reason to doubt his good judgment. "Fuck." He sits down on the bed and scrubs his hands over his face. "Great. Now what?"
The mattress dips next to him; Shou-chan says, "You take a break and sort yourself out, that's what."
Kazunari snorts. "Easy for you to say. How'm I supposed to pay my rent if I'm not working?" Rather, where is he going to find a job that pays enough to cover all his expenses and work his clerkship hours once it begins?
"Well, now, it's funny you should ask me that." Shou-chan sounds like he's grinning. When Kazunari looks to check, he finds that he's right. "Just so happens that it's past time this place had another bartender. You ever thought about taking up making drinks for fun and profit?"
For a second, he wonders whether Shou-chan is actually serious—but he seems to be. "No," Kazunari says. "What, you think I should try and persuade Nijimura that he wants to hire me on?" Nijimura's always presided behind the bar in solitary splendor; he has a tough time imagining that changing.
Shou-chan continues to grin lazily. "Convince, hell. He's been whining about being too busy for ages now. He's just about talked me into it."
What—what? First, there's the incongruous image of Nijimura whining, then there's the implication that Shou-chan has any sort of say in running the bar. Kazunari's always had suspicions about what Shou-chan and Nijimura get up to in their off hours, but still.
Shou-chan raises his eyebrows, maybe because of the look Kazunari is giving him. "What, you thought our little arrangement here just happened out of the vacuum? We're partners, brat. He runs the downstairs and I handle the upstairs."
"…oh," Kazunari says, because that does make a few things make more sense. He shakes his head, trying to clear it. There are more important things to worry about. "Wait, why are you offering me this?" Why the hell is Shou-chan going this far out of the way for him?
Shou-chan stands up and shrugs. "Because I want to, that's why." He holds a hand down to Kazunari. "C'mon, let's get you dressed. Then you and him can figure out how you want to make this work."
Kazunari looks up at him; Shou-chan smiles down at him, perfectly bland except for the little bit of softness around his eyes, like affection. He takes Shou-chan's hand and lets himself be pulled to his feet. "Thanks."
"Don't mention it," Shou-chan tells him. "I've got a reputation to maintain."
No one really says anything when Kazunari starts shadowing Nijimura, either. The new guys haven't been around long enough to know any better (he'd swear they don't even recognize him when he's out of drag) and the ones who've been around a while seem to get it without having to ask. That's what he figures it means when Kise bumps fists with him on his first night and Himuro favors him with a wry little smile that actually makes it all the way to his eyes for once.
None of the bar's patrons seem to pick up on the change; a few of his regulars even ask after him. Kazunari enjoys being able to tell them that the guy they're after is on vacation for a while, and no, he doesn't know when he's coming back. It probably means that Shou-chan was right about his needing to take a break. Whatever.
Not that he's working on getting his head straightened out, whatever that means. Learning how to tend bar takes up a lot of Kazunari's attention, and the overlap in his old job and the new one amuses him. They're both about customer satisfaction, and if anything, working the bar is even more demanding on that front. After all, not everyone who drinks at the Emperor is there to pick up a hooker, and Nijimura expects perfection. It makes for a lot of information to assimilate: drink recipes, Nijimura's finicky preferences for how the bar's workstations need to be arranged, all the different preferences the regulars have. Kazunari doesn't care. He's learned to be good at memorizing lots of new information in a hurry and he's a fucking genius at small talk and besides, he thrives on challenges. And it's a different kind of hard work to stay on his feet for hours on end. Kazunari falls into his bed, exhausted, at the ends of his shifts, and is happy to do it. Best of all, he's busy enough that he doesn't have the time to waste on thinking about useless things. (No, of course it's not healthy, but if he can just get through the remainder of his vacation, he'll be fine. Once his clerkship starts up, he'll be far too busy again to think about anything troublesome. Go long enough without thinking about something, and it stops mattering. The mind routes around it, the way an oyster secretes nacre around a piece of grit or the human body can heal itself around a foreign object. It's still there, but it's insulated and can't cause hurt anymore.)
For a wonder, he manages it: the first day after vacation ends, Kazunari reports to a conference room for the first day of his clinical clerkship and (with any luck at all) the rest of his life with the rest of his classmates who've finally cleared their exams, all without having to spend more time than absolutely necessary dwelling on what's over and done with.
Shuutoku is a hell of a teaching hospital. Maybe it's not Toudai, but it's right up there, Kazunari concludes while he and his cohort make their tour through the campus, looking in on all the different departments and state-of-the-art facilities where they'll be working for the next two years.
"Worth it?" Shou-chan asks Thursday night during a lull in the rush for drinks.
Kazunari shrugs at him. "Yeah, I think it's going to be." He doesn't have any intention of letting it be otherwise. "Doesn't quite feel real yet." There's something kind of surreal about following Miyaji-sensei around as he makes his rounds through the oncology ward (what a place to start, but Miyaji-sensei says that if they can survive this rotation, they can survive anything). It's a whole different kind of learning compared to the classroom work—it's hard to imagine himself being as confident as the doctors and nurses he's observing are. Still. It's definitely worth all the work he's put in over the past few years to get here.
Shou-chan holds his glass out for a refill; Kazunari tops him off with a shot of tonic and a fresh wedge of lime. He raises his eyebrows at the way Shou-chan is studying him, but Shou-chan just gestures with his chin. "Think someone wants your attention."
"That's one way of putting it." Kazunari sighs and heads down to where a kid is well on his way to making his first trip to a gay bar a drunken fiasco, hoping that he's not going to be mopping up puke before the night's out. (He hopes in vain.)
It's like the universe has it out for him or something, though, because no sooner does Kazunari assure Shou-chan that life as a clinical clerk is pretty awesome than everything goes to hell.
The worst part is that he doesn't even see it coming—well, why would he? It's not like Kazunari expects to ever run into Shintarou again, which is why it feels like a punch to the gut when he's at lunch with Miyaji-sensei and the rest of his cohort and sees a guy carrying a giant, overstuffed pink rabbit come through the door and realizes that it's Shintarou.
"What the heck?" Tomita asks, staring across the cafeteria. "I thought you said that this was the staff-only cafeteria."
Miyaji-sensei turns in his seat to look while Kazunari slouches down in his seat, feeling nauseated. "That's Midorima. He's doing his residency with Nakatani-sensei."
"He's carrying a giant pink rabbit." Kaida cranes her head to peer at Shintarou—Midorima? Midorima, geez. "Do you think it's for a patient?" She sounds like she's on the verge of cooing.
"No, he's just a freak." Miyaji-sensei's tone is flat. "That's his lucky item. He's got a new one every day."
"Lucky… item?" Tomita repeats, looking around the table like he's not sure he's heard that correctly. Kazunari could tell him that he has, but his mouth is too dry for that. Shintarou is doing his residency here at Shuutoku? Oh, fuck. Fuck.
"Yeah, he's a really superstitious bastard." Miyaji-sensei shakes his head. "He'd never get away with it if he weren't almost as good as he thinks he is, or his family wasn't part of the Midorima medical group."
"He's one of those Midorimas?" Kazunari is amazed that his voice doesn't come out like a croak, but it sounds normal, even though Shintarou is apparently related to one of the most prestigious medical groups in the area, maybe the country.
"Only son of their director." Miyaji-sensei grimaces. "And he's a real prick, too. Won't talk to any of us lesser mortals if he can help it."
Kazunari bites down on his tongue before he can say anything stupid—Shintarou's not like that, he's awkward and shy, and—he's moving down the cafeteria line and carrying his tray of food to an empty table. He looks tired, like he's been driving himself hard lately, and Kazunari can read tension in his shoulders and the precise way he arranges his dishes before him. He does not look as though he expects to share his table with anyone but the rabbit.
Fuck. Fuck, what is he supposed to do now?
Kazunari is distantly aware that the rest of his tablemates are continuing to talk, maybe about Shintarou or maybe about something else—he isn't listening, frozen between hoping that Shintarou will look his way and see him and terrified that he might. Fuck, what is he going to do—he's not supposed to run into anyone he knows outside the bar, that's why it's clear on the other side of the prefecture from Shuutoku and he wore the drag—and he's definitely not supposed to ever see Shintarou again—hah. Shintarou probably chose the Emperor for the same reason he did, because it's so far from his normal circles. Talk about irony.
He must eat the rest of his lunch, though he has no memory of doing it or tasting it. When the rest of his cohort rises to take their trays over to the kitchen's service hatch and then head back to work, Kazunari follows them, moving on autopilot.
Shintarou never once looks up from his lunch.
