Short fic for IllyaTsubomi Ao3.
Kaoru has gotten used to seeing pictures of his face online. He has automatic responses prepared for any sentence that begins with "aren't you" while he's waiting in line at the grocery store or buying dinner at a restaurant. The locals at his gym know who he is – sometimes they'll approach him with rumors they heard from their high school aged children or coworkers, and he'll politely deny them. Sometimes the rumors are true. Most of the time, they aren't.
Those are all on the list of things he's recently gotten used to, along with Tsubasa's disturbing ability to inhale food and Teru managing to find his way into everyone's business, regardless of whether they wanted him in it or not. And Kaoru supposed, to Teru's credit, that it was one of the reasons the man had become a lawyer in the first place.
He really wished Teru would stay out of his business sometimes.
"You and Kashiwagi?" Teru leans forward a little bit, relaxing his chin as it rests on his hand. His eyes are closed. Kaoru is half tempted to knock his elbow off the table, watch as the other man's head takes a dive towards the wooden surface.
It wouldn't fix anything, and Kaoru knows that, so he clenches his fists and allows both of their hands to remain where they currently are. He takes the time that he could be wasting lashing out, and spends it wondering how he found himself in this situation instead. They're both educated people. When he'd told Teru he wasn't certain if he could continue working with Dramatic Stars, and Teru had asked him to "sit down, let's talk about this before you do anything else", this should have been the outcome he'd anticipated.
Teru had once made an entire career out of his natural charisma, convincing people to open up and spill their secrets. He had a gift, a talent, for getting to the bottom of things, and a compassion that left most people not minding when Teru left the room with their life's story in hand.
Still, the palms of Kaoru's hands began to itch as he waited for Teru's response. Teru didn't seem like the type to judge, but now that Kaoru had confessed his feelings, he was beginning to wonder why it was taking him so long to respond. A part of him was already prepared to get angry, defensive.
Before Kaoru can lash out, Teru finally opens his eyes.
"In retrospect," he decides, "I should have seen that coming out."
The pent up anger in Kaoru starts to deflate, but he's still not exactly happy with this response. Whether or not he should slap Teru's arm off the table is a thought worthy of reconsideration.
"Don't joke about this," Kaoru sighs.
"Okay," Teru agrees. "No more jokes... But this does make a lot of sense. When did you realize your feelings for him?"
He waits for a response that never arrives, then realizes that Kaoru staring at the table some more is his response, and that Kaoru doesn't know. It's okay, because Teru is the more experienced of the two, if only slightly, and he's supposed to know what to do. Furthermore, he's sort of like the hero of their unit, right? The one who functions as the glue of their team, who keeps the three of them together. It's the hero's job to always know what to do!
Good advice doesn't take long to come to mind. "I wouldn't worry about your work relationships in Dramatic Stars suffering, if that's the case," Teru tells him. "You've probably had these feelings for a while, without realizing them. Acknowledging them now isn't going to affect our performance."
Kaoru crumbles. He slumps, rigid posture going slack, and Teru's only seen that happen a handful of times before. Once when the truth was revealed about his sister, and again... It's not that important right now, but Teru realizes he can't think of a second time.
Or maybe it is important, because Kaoru seems to be holding these two, very dissimilar, events on a similar plane of stressfulness. That shouldn't be the case, Teru thinks. There's nothing wrong with falling in love.
"How would you know?" Kaoru grumbles into his hands, where he's currently hiding his face. His glasses slip off his nose, pushed up to the top of his hairline, as he uses his fingers to knead the flesh there. "I doubt you've ever been in my situation."
"Actually," Teru scratches the hair on his chin.
He'd been planning on keeping this a secret for a while longer, but it feels like something Kaoru needs to hear right now. The first word alone has Kaoru peeking his head up, his hair a disheveled mess already.
"Don't tell me... that producer? You two would really suit each other."
"That's similar to how I feel while watching you and Kashiwagi interact... Her kid would probably enjoy being able to visit both of his uncles at once, by the way," Teru replies, confirming his suspicions without directly confirming anything.
"We're not going to be your personal babysitters," Kaoru retorts.
Teru just smiles to himself, and thinks "gotcha". There's hope for this shrewd yet, to realize the turbulence of change is not always a bad thing.