fic for track_04 (part 1)
Gift fic for: track_04
From: budiamond
Title: What It Seems (part 1)
Rating: PG-15
Pairing: Tegoshi-centric; Tegoshi/Massu (one-sided), Massu/Ryo
Warnings: Unethical scientific practices, dark themes
Summary: They were worthless nobodies whose lives had long since been taken out of their own hands. In many ways, Tegoshi’s situation wasn’t much different.
Notes: track_04! I tried to give you a dark(ish) Tegoshi-centric AU with Massu/Ryo, but I quickly learned that such a combination is difficult to pull off. It’s possibly a bit ridiculous, but I hope that you can still enjoy it a little♥
“The dregs of society,” they'd called them, on that first fateful day when he'd been taken behind closed doors and given the information that had subsequently trapped him there. They were worthless nobodies who no one cared for and everyone turned a blind eye to; the people whose lives had long since been taken out of their own hands.
In many ways, his situation wasn’t much different.
Of course, unlike them, he was free to come and go as he pleased - it was actually preferred that he not get in the way during observation periods, and he in turn had no desire to stay - but to all intents and purposes, he was as trapped and scared and hopeless as they were. Just like them, he had no way out.
---
Tegoshi Yuya eyed his reflection critically. Upon closer inspection, the new suit seemed a little too tight on him, but he had no option other than to wear it now. His usual suit had developed a hole, and if the choice came down to either wearing holey clothes, or having his crotch framed for all the world to see, he was going with the latter option.
His mother was just laying breakfast on the table as he came out into the dining room, and, same as he did every morning, Tegoshi breathed in deep, hoping that the lingering smell of cooking food would make him feel at least somewhat hungry.
“Good morning, Yuya.” His mother spoke without turning around as she put the last plate, stacked high with the dressed leafy greens that were all Tegoshi could manage some mornings, onto a placemat.
“Morning.” He slid into his usual chair, still trying to will up an appetite.
His mother sat across from him, spooning food onto her plate, and he followed her example, knowing from experience that he wouldn’t finish it all.
Never mind, he told himself, the same way he did every weekday. He ate properly on the weekends, when he didn’t have to think about work. When his stomach was more settled.
He avoided the baby tomatoes in the salad; hadn’t been able to eat them since the first time he’d bitten into one after he’d begun his new job. He’d liked them in the past, but now, the way they popped in his mouth and spilt their insides all over his tongue made him think of bursting blood vessels and rupturing organs. It had been enough to send him running to the bathroom.
Then again, he thought idly, chewing away on a mouthful of baby spinach leaves, perhaps he was desensitized now. He’d long since stopped saying sorry each time he slipped the point of a needle under skin and pushed down on the syringe - not that he didn’t feel sorry, it was just easier to ignore it now than it once had been. They were always too frightened to hear him, anyway.
“Have you got much to do at work today?” His mother asked, cutting through his thoughts.
“I’m not sure. I’ll find out.” Tegoshi shrugged and forced a smile. It was all he could really say.
He’d never been good at lying, and had been forced to become a master of evasion as a consequence. In the beginning he’d made up stories to ease his mother’s mind, about arranging meetings and the friends he was making at work, but in the end, he’d lost track of them. It was easier, he’d concluded, to keep secrets than to tell lies.
As usual, Tegoshi picked at his breakfast until it was time to go, then pushed his plate away, still half full, thanking his mother for cooking.
It was a struggle for him to leave the house during the week; the moment when he stepped from the soothing comfort of his home and began the walk down the path to the bus stop always felt like the true beginning of a new work day. It was a moment he liked to postpone for as long as possible, but, as inevitable as the yearly onset of winter, it always came. After all, he was well aware that the consequences of missing work would be far worse than the days he endured there.
He got to the bus stop at the same time as the bus, cutting it close as always, and climbed in the backdoor, sliding into an empty seat and settling his briefcase at his feet.
He caught the same young man that he saw on the bus every day - the one with short, brown hair and dark eyes, who always had a heavy bag of law books - trying to sneak glances at him surreptitiously, and Tegoshi shot him a smile, holding back a chuckle when the man blushed cherry red and looked away fast enough to give himself whiplash.
They’d never met, but he was pretty sure that the guy had a crush on him; Tegoshi had always been good at identifying other man-liking men - it was a gift - and while he felt a little bad for teasing him, he didn’t feel bad enough to stop. It was like an adult game of peek-a-boo, and god knows he needed a bit of fun and games in his life.
High-rise buildings rose up in front of them as they approached the city, and soon enough Tegoshi could see his company building too; a looming, twisted structure of glass, concrete and steel. The young man got off at the same stop as all the other university students, and Tegoshi knew from years of catching the same bus into town that they were only another stop away from his own.
It always felt like he was walking into prison when he entered the sliding doors of the building, closing behind him with a hum and an ominous click. It sounded nothing like the clang of a cell door, but to him, the feeling was the same.
He greeted the receptionist with a nod as he walked past her, digging his swipe card out of his pocket and catching the elevator up to the 16th floor.
It looked so misleadingly ordinary up here, like any other company building, with its off-white walls and beige carpets, and Tegoshi thought it was unfairly deceptive. He’d always been the type to believe that things should look the way they were, but the bland interior gave nothing away.
Tegoshi left his things in his office - it had been his father’s just over two years ago, but the thought was hardly a happy one - and then, steeling himself, he went next door to see Miyagi-san.
He knocked on the door, waiting a moment before pushing it ajar.
“May I come in?”
Whenever Tegoshi spoke to Miyagi, it was always with the utmost politeness. To anyone who didn't know, it would sound like he was being extra humble and subservient to the CEO. To those who knew him better, it was obvious that Tegoshi used the formal register to seem distant and cold; polite to the point that it was almost rude, without a thing anyone could do about it.
“Please come in, Tegoshi-kun.”
Like the building, Miyagi’s appearance was deceptively normal. Thinning hair and lightly etched wrinkles around the skin of his eyes and mouth betrayed his age, and he wore his impeccable, expensive suit like any other chief executive.
Before meeting him, Tegoshi had imagined monsters to be hideous, deformed creatures, like the spirits from folklore or the ogre masks worn during the bean-throwing festival. But that was something else he’d had to learn. Monsters could take any form; even the form of an elderly man with thin, wire-framed glasses and a well-tailored suit.
The same as every morning, they got right to business. In the beginning, Miyagi had attempted to build a good rapport between them, just for the sake of it, but Tegoshi hadn’t been interested and there was no way to change that. He viewed the man as his captor, and idle chat about weather, family and hobbies seemed like a joke. Bright-eyed, friendly Koyama, Miyagi’s other personal assistant, couldn’t understand his attitude; he found it perplexing that Tegoshi refused to go on company trips or come out for a drink in the evenings - that he refused to have anything to do with his job outside of work hours. In Koyama’s opinion, they were treated rather well, and even if Tegoshi had had the heart to let him know otherwise, he didn’t have the option.
Like so many of the other employees, Koyama was blind to the inner workings of the company. He handled the harmless, everyday files, took the innocent phone calls, arranged meetings with the upstanding, squeaky clean organizations… then again, if he’d gotten his hands on any of the files Tegoshi dealt with, he’d never have known the difference.
“I’m good with people, so I make a good secretary,” Koyama had admitted to him early in the job, “but I don’t have a medical background or anything, so I wouldn’t be able to figure out what to do with the reports you organize. I guess that’s why he needs you for them, right? You went to medical school, didn’t you?”
Tegoshi had smiled, a little wistfully.
“I was actually training to be a nurse,” he’d said, “but my father used to own a pharmaceutical company.”
He’d left it there, as though that gave him any idea of how pharmaceutics worked and what the paperwork he handled said. In reality, he couldn’t understand the reports either, but it would seem less suspicious if Koyama thought that he could. It actually was his nurse training - despite never having finished the program - that made him valuable to them; that and his financial ties to the company that wouldn’t allow him leave.
The situation was no fault of his own, but that didn’t matter. It still gave Miyagi full power over him, and Tegoshi was helpless to fight back.
“We’ve reached what Suzuki-sensei hopes is a breakthrough with the vaccine. They’ll be running some new tests today, so you’re needed in the lab by nine.”
Tegoshi nodded mechanically, but couldn’t help the twisting sensation in his stomach or the feeling of nausea that crept through his body like a disease.
“And will my services be required up here as well?” He asked, using the humblest language he could muster.
“You’ll need to be out for the observations at one o’clock. Get some lunch then, and be up here by half past. I have some meetings I need you to arrange.”
“Of course.” Tegoshi smiled, sweet and obedient, all lips and no teeth. It was the fakest smile in his repertoire, but that was the whole point of it. There were few ways he could express his loathing for the company and everyone involved in its back alley work. If fake smiles and too-polite words were all he had at his disposal, then he’d use them.
It always felt good to leave Miyagi’s office, even if the place he was going next wasn’t much better. It was a crushing, suffocating feeling to be around someone who had absolute power over you, and it left him with the uneasy sensation that the floor could be ripped out from beneath his feet at any moment.
Back in his office, he took his wallet from his briefcase and dug through the pocket where he kept his cards. Tegoshi had two swipe cards for getting around inside the building; the one he kept around his neck during the day was the regular one that most employees had; it was the same one Koyama used to get to the 16th floor in the morning and start work, the same one the office ladies had to bring tea to the other members of staff.
The second one he kept hidden in plain sight in his wallet in the form of an expired library card. No one ever looked twice at it, which was the general idea. That card let Tegoshi get to places in the building that very few people had access to - places that very few people knew existed.
The ride down to the laboratory always gave him chills. A few years ago, he’d been known amongst his friends for being happy-go-lucky and difficult to unnerve. Now to make him ill at ease, all it took were the grinding gears of the elevator, and the mechanical beep as it counted off each floor it passed.
If Tegoshi had ever been asked to imagine a lab where illegal experiments were taking place before he’d been stuck in this whole mess, he probably would’ve imagined a dank, dark place with broken pipes and dripping water; strangely-colored, fizzing concoctions in glass beakers and rusty, unkempt medical equipment.
As it was, the lab was spotlessly clean, with high-tech machines and no uncovered chemical substances of any sort. The only things that he would’ve imagined correctly were the stretchers, with their straps and buckles and harnesses. He tried not to look at them when he could help it. They made him feel sick.
He could understand why, on that first day he'd been brought down here, they'd justified it the way they had. He didn't want to be like them, felt a little disgusted with himself whenever he used their words to comfort himself, but they were the one thing that got him to sleep at night.
“It’s only the people nobody would miss anyway.”
Homeless people, teenage runaways, worthless, insignificant people without family or friends. They were just sacrificing the nobodies to save the somebodies.
He knew he would never truly believe that that made it okay, and he didn't want to either - wouldn't be able to forgive himself if he did - but it made it easier to stomach what he was doing if he thought of them as insignificant, people without names or identities.
It was getting closer to flu season now, which was always a busy time in the lab. It meant more work for Tegoshi, more terrified, pleading eyes, begging him not to come near them with the needle, but at the same time, it was a relief.
The first year he'd begun working down here, they'd been commissioned by a sector of the government to research a vaccine for the Marburg virus after a suspected breakout in a Tokyo hospital. It was the first time he’d worked in the bio safety level 4 section of the lab. He’d gone through training in there in beginning in how to handle dangerous infectious agents and how the safety functions worked, just in case, but he’d never had any practical experience in there until that moment.
That section of the lab was used almost exclusively for research and very rarely for infecting and testing subjects, and it was hard for Tegoshi to believe that he wasn’t on a movie set as he walked through the airlock doors. He was instructed to shower and go through the ultraviolet room, then was put into a Hazardous Materials suit and watched carefully by the laboratory director the whole time.
He’d never heard of the Marburg virus before, and it was only a week later when he heard about the case at the hospital on the news that he found out anything about it.
Fortunately, the announcer on the news had said, it hadn’t been Marburg, but an outbreak of malaria instead, originating from a man who had recently come back from a holiday to Africa, then taken a turn for the worse a couple of days later.
It was all good news, the announcer had continued, informing viewers that all infected parties had been quarantined and were recovering comfortably, but by that point, Tegoshi had long stopped listening. He’d known in the back of his mind that it would be bad, that it wouldn’t have been dealt with in a level four bio safety lab if it hadn’t, but the words from her brief description of the Marburg virus - “hemorrhage, organ failure, delirium” - echoed in his ears, and he felt a wave of shock crash over him, followed by the slow onset of horror.
“It’s lucky it was something else.” His mother had looked up from her book to comment, but Tegoshi hadn’t been able to answer, because even if the case at the hospital had been a false alarm, he’d still infected half a dozen people with the real thing.
That night, he’d dreamed about vomiting up his liquefied internal organs and bleeding from every pore in his body.
Infecting test subjects with a simple case of influenza was almost a treat after that.
It wasn’t so much the fatality rate of the diseases that made his skin crawl, he thought, not for the first time, as he changed into his medical gown. Once they ceased to be useful, all subjects were terminated - the other personnel used the term ‘euthanize’, but Tegoshi didn’t see the point of trying to cover up such a glaringly ugly deed with a euphemism - to assure there was no leaking of information. It was the pain they went through prior to their deaths that bothered him.
“Ah, Tegoshi-kun. You’re already here. Good.”
He jerked in surprise, not having heard anyone come into the changing area.
“Suzuki-sensei.” He nodded his head in greeting, as shallowly as possible, then returned to fitting the disposable gloves over his hands.
“You’ll just be giving an anesthetic and administering the latest vaccine to six new subjects today. Regretfully, last weeks’ batch caused respiratory problems in all eight subjects, and one suffered a seizure, so we’re behind the projected schedule, but we think we’ve made a breakthrough.”
“I heard,” Tegoshi said, tone brusque.
He followed Suzuki-sensei out into the lab again and began to prepare the anesthetic. It was standard protocol, the scientists figuring that it was best if the people they were experimenting on weren’t fully aware that they’d been injected with, or exposed to, anything other than hypnotics. A calm test subject was a good test subject, after all, particularly if the observers needed to monitor for changes in their breathing patterns.
The first lab rat, strapped down and wheeled out on the stretcher, was a homeless girl. She’d been cleaned up for sanitary purposes, but it still showed in her tattered appearance - long nails in need of cutting, hair with ragged ends. But no matter where they came from, their eyes were always the same. He did his best to avoid meeting their gazes now, but even if he tried his hardest to stare fixedly at the needle and concentrate on the bare skin of their arms, he still couldn’t help but notice the fear in their faces. Couldn’t help but hear the muffled pleas and screams through their gags.
As always, the needle slipped under the skin without any problems, leaving nothing more than an almost invisible pinprick. It never failed to bring him back to his year and a half as a nursing trainee, when he’d been a fresh faced, naïve high school graduate with big ambitions and a rose-colored view of the world.
He always had been the best at giving injections.
---
Tegoshi didn’t expect that he’d be hungry, but he forced himself to eat when his lunch break started. He made his usual trip out of the building, deciding to buy a bento from the shop across the road today, then came back to eat alone in the cafeteria on the first floor. It was his policy not to buy lunch from their building, not wanting to put any more money into the company than necessary. One more little way of fighting back.
He had never been a big people watcher until he’d started this job - ‘harmlessly self-centered’ he’d been known as when he’d been in high school, and it had been a fairly accurate description - but he didn’t like having time to think anymore, and so his breaks were now spent intently watching the other employees as he ate.
He didn’t spend much time socializing, and so the majority of the faces surrounding him were unfamiliar, but he did spot Nishikido Ryo standing in line at the cafeteria.
From what Tegoshi had heard, the board of directors was considering letting him in on the company secret very soon. Barely scraping thirty, he already had a PhD in pharmaceutical science and a bachelors in microbiology, and had easily secured an important position in the company upon graduation. He was hailed as a young genius, and when he’d joined, everyone had said how lucky they’d been to snatch him up.
He spent most of his time at the company’s official Tokyo lab, but came to the main office once a month for meetings and report writing. If the board did decide to go ahead and bring him behind closed doors for a chat, though, Tegoshi would probably be seeing much more of him very soon.
He watched Ryo walk past with his lunch, wondering how long it would take him to hate the sight of his face as much as he hated Miyagi’s or Suzuki-sensei’s, and was completely unprepared for the shriek and clatter that followed when someone tripped on his table leg and knocked his bento box to the floor.
The culprit stared wide-eyed at the ground, clutching an empty tray that had, until that moment, held a bowl of the cafeteria’s udon noodles.
He looked back between Tegoshi’s surprised face and the mess on the linoleum, before his neck flushed red and he stuttered an apology, diving for the paper napkin that had fluttered to the floor when he’d, quite literally, lost his lunch.
Tegoshi watched as he tried in vain to mop up the spill with the tiny napkin, then smothered a giggle when he noticed that the man’s shirt had come untucked and that his boxers - from what he could see, a satin pair in an alarmingly bright rainbow hue - were visible, peeking out above the top of his pants.
The cleaners showed up a moment later, shooing the man away from the mess, telling him they’d take care of it.
He straightened up, appearing unsure of what to do, before facing Tegoshi and looking at him with a guilty expression.
“I’m sorry. I spilt your lunch. If you’d like, I can buy you a new one.”
Tegoshi felt himself smiling, the expression coming to his face with an unusual ease that he hadn’t experienced in what felt like forever.
“It’s okay. I wasn’t that hungry. But, uh… your shirt isn’t tucked in.”
The man looked confused for a moment, before realizing what had happened, and the flush that had crept down his neck earlier colored his face as well as he fixed his clothes.
“Thank you,” he said, and despite his embarrassment, smiled, little dimples appearing on each side of his mouth.
Tegoshi’s heart somersaulted.
“Yoshimoto-san?”
His thoughts were pulled from the endearing way the man’s bangs fell into his eyes and the sweet curve of his full lips by Ryo, who, he hadn’t noticed until now, had been standing by, waiting for the adorable stranger’s attention.
“Ah, Nishikido-san. I’m sorry.”
Ryo regarded Tegoshi with his piercing, dark eyes for a moment before they swept away from him, focusing on the other man again.
“I see you’ve met Tegoshi-san.”
Figuring that was his cue, Tegoshi stood up. He was painfully aware of his tight suit pants, but tried to ignore them, hoping that no one else would notice. He bowed slightly, flashing his most charming smile, which, once again, came surprisingly easily.
“I’m Tegoshi Yuya. I’m the CEO’s personal assistant. It’s nice to meet you.”
The man returned his smile, showing those gorgeous dimples again, and if Tegoshi had been the type to swoon, he certainly would have then.
“I’m Yoshimoto Ren,” he introduced himself. “But feel free to call me Massu. Everyone does.”
Tegoshi opened his mouth to reply, but stopped in mid motion, face taking on a quizzical look. He thought he saw a flash of panic cross Massu’s face for a second, before it was disappeared, replaced with a lopsided grin, accompanied by an awkward laugh.
“You must be wondering how I got that nickname, huh,” he said, chuckles taking on a nervous tone as he brought up exactly the point Tegoshi had just been considering. “Well… it’s a funny story, actually…”
He didn’t elaborate, though, standing there in an awkward silence while Tegoshi waited, feeling as though something was out of place.
“He was just telling me about that, actually.” Ryo stepped smoothly into the conversation. “Apparently it’s Massu, as in masu. You know. Like a trout. Supposedly he looked a bit like a fish back in high school.”
Massu and Ryo exchanged a look, one that Tegoshi couldn’t pinpoint the meaning behind, before Massu started to laugh again.
“Yeah. I don’t look like one anymore, though. Just when I eat. I have a kind of big mouth. Have you ever seen a dead trout? They’re kind of like this.”
He opened his mouth in an imitation of a dead fish, and for the second time that day, a giggle bubbled up from Tegoshi’s throat, followed by a small fit of laughter which Massu soon joined in on.
“You’re interesting,” Tegoshi said once he regained control of himself, his professionalism dissolving along with the brooding manner he usually possessed at work. “Interesting and a bit strange.”
Massu’s eyebrows knitted together, looking slightly offended, but Tegoshi hadn’t meant it in a bad way. Quite the opposite.
“We’d better be going.” Ryo spoke up again. “I still have to show Yoshimoto-san the rest of the building. If you’ll excuse us.”
“Maybe I’ll see you around, Tegoshi-san.” Massu waved to him. “I’ll pay you back for the lunch if I do.”
Tegoshi happily accepted the offer, waving to the two of them in farewell. He watched Massu leave the room, unaware that he had his hand pressed lightly to his chest.
He didn’t hang around the cafeteria long after Ryo and Massu left; he had things he needed to do.
Usually Tegoshi dragged his feet and made himself as inefficient as possible when he was doing the personal assistant part of his job, but today he worked quickly, leaving him time to nose around in the employee files - if there was one advantage to being the glorified whipping boy of the CEO, it was the access to things that his other co-workers may not have had.
From what he could see, Yoshimoto Ren had just started working at the company. He had a Masters in pharmaceutical science, and had come to the company to get some on the job experience before starting his PhD. He'd be working under Nishikido Ryo as an assistant for the duration of his time here, but had shown promise at some prestigious university in China that he'd transferred to partway through his undergraduate degree.
He was 27 years old, a good 6 years older than Tegoshi was, which was surprising given his youthful face, but not so surprising when you considered his qualifications.
It was a pity, he thought, that Massu would be spending the majority of his time with Ryo in the other lab, and not at the main company building where he had a greater chance of running into Tegoshi.
It wasn't just the promise of a free lunch that made him want to see Massu again. Tegoshi wasn't the type to try and fool himself; he knew he'd taken a more-than-friendly interest in him upon first glance, and there was no point in trying to deny it. Besides, what with the ease with which Massu had made him smile, Tegoshi knew he'd be a fool not to pursue his interest further.
Massu seemed so wonderfully open and genuine, so honest and simple, a spot of brightness in a world that had been dark for far too long. Tegoshi wanted - needed - that kind of brightness after two years of nothing but secrets and lies.
Of course, that Massu had a rather handsome face didn't hurt either. Tegoshi just hoped his rainbow boxers were a sign of his persuasion and not just a sign of someone with a bizarre sense of fashion.
And so in the following weeks, he and Massu certainly did see one another again, just not by chance. Tegoshi actively sought him out, checking up on Massu’s work timetable; which day he was scheduled to be here in the main building, what time, where - he had it all memorized. It seemed a little creepy when he stopped to think about it, but Tegoshi dismissed that. It was just him, after all, and he had his reasons; with the influenza vaccine well on its way to being ready to sell off to the government, the company had once again turned its eyes to cures and vaccines for more dangerous, harmful diseases. If there was a time when he’d need someone like Massu around, this was definitely it.
The second time they met, it was completely orchestrated by Tegoshi. Massu was in the main building for a weekly meeting with two of the department managers, and, true to his nature, Tegoshi didn’t even bother to make his presence seem like a coincidence; he just waited outside the room for the meeting to finish, and then once the managers had left, poked his head in and said hi.
Massu looked surprised for a moment, face scrunching up slightly as he presumably tried to recall where he knew Tegoshi’s face from, smoothing into a smile when it came back to him.
“Hello. Tegoshi-san, right?”
It hadn’t actually occurred to Tegoshi before now that Massu might not remember who he was, but he was certainly glad he did, and felt his lips spread into a grin.
“Yeah. Just Tegoshi is fine. So, are you on lunch break now?”
A brief flicker of what looked like suspicion crossed Massu’s features, and he looked puzzled, staring without saying a word. Tegoshi felt oddly like he was being scrutinized, and the atmosphere was just beginning to get uncomfortable when Massu was back to smiling and everything was normal again.
“I still owe you lunch, don’t I,” he said, and his expression was so warm and friendly that Tegoshi was almost convinced that he’d imagined Massu’s initial reaction. “Do you want to eat together?”
Honestly, Tegoshi had long forgotten that Massu had offered to buy him lunch the first time they’d met, but he nodded anyway. He wasn’t going to say no to a free meal.
They went to a quaint little shop down the street, and for the first time in a long time, Tegoshi didn't even have to try to distract himself so he could get his food down. Massu was enthralling - well, to be honest, Massu was actually a bit awkward. Tegoshi often found himself jumping in to fill gaps in the conversation when Massu suddenly ran out of things to say and plunged them into unnatural silence. But to Tegoshi, he was so interesting, so unique, that even these characteristics had a sort of charm to them.
It was only a short 20 minutes they were out together, but they really hit it off. Tegoshi felt Massu warm to him quickly, becoming visibly more comfortable as their break wore on, and he felt himself exposing more and more of his true nature to Massu, the old Tegoshi finally showing his face from behind the corporate mask.
“I was glad to see your suit was properly tucked in today,” he said, a mischievous smile curling his lips at the corners.
Massu flushed, but answered in a deadpan tone, “Yeah. And your pants fit you today.”
Tegoshi actually felt his face color a little as well, but he laughed it off. So Massu had noticed.
“I guess we've both improved over the last week.”
Massu chuckled, and Tegoshi experienced a tingle of pleasure from being the one to cause it. He felt an actual sense of disappointment when they reached the sliding glass doors of the company and had to go their separate ways.
“I guess I'll see you around.” Massu bid him farewell in the lobby.
Tegoshi nodded.
“Definitely. Let's have lunch together again some time,” he suggested, feeling warm when Massu smiled again and agreed.
His elation lasted all of ten minutes, before Miyagi called him into his office and told him he was needed in the lab. Tegoshi’s stomach clenched and he could feel the curry rice he’d eaten for lunch churn inside him as he left to get his swipe card. He tried to relax, concentrating on recalling his lunch with Massu to calm himself.
He thought about him all the way down in the elevator, and then, for the first time ever while sinking a needle into an arm of a terrified, unwilling test subject, with the memory of Massu’s low, comforting voice in his mind, Tegoshi actually felt okay.
---
It was a relief, he thought as he ate a full breakfast the next morning, to finally have something to ground and soothe him during difficult times. He felt a bit like a middle school student with a crush, but when he thought about Massu’s beaming smile and his dimples and crinkled eyes, it crowded out all his less pleasant thoughts.
“Were you very hungry this morning, Yuya?” His mother asked him as she took his plate from under his nose, with barely concealed delight in her voice.
Tegoshi looked at her blankly, not realizing for a second that he’d finished everything he’d put on his dish.
“Yeah,” he replied, after a brief moment of thought, “I guess I must have been.”
It felt like it was bordering on obsession, with the amount of time Tegoshi spent thinking about him, but he figured that if he was acting normally around Massu and didn’t mention how much he felt about him, it didn’t matter. What did matter was that Tegoshi finally had something to cling to, to get him through the day. Nothing had changed about his dirty, disgraceful job, but Massu’s presence in his life, whether abstract or tangible, was enough to change the way he handled it.
“You look happier recently,” his mother finally told him one morning before he left for work, an echo of something Koyama had said to him the other day in the copy room.
Tegoshi smiled. “There’s a lot to be happy about recently.”
He was trying his best to be cryptic, but his mother flashed him a knowing smile before dropping the topic. He was both glad and a little disappointed that she had. He half wanted to keep it all a secret, but also half wanted to talk non-stop about the person who’d captured his heart and brought some form of brightness back into his life.
It’d been a while since he’d felt either excitement or anticipation, but today as he rode the bus to work, he felt both of them at once. Today was Wednesday, the day that Tegoshi knew Massu spent at the main office building to do the written, company side of his work, as opposed to the practical side.
He stared out the window of the bus on his way to work, as had become habit for him over the past week, and didn’t pay any attention to the other passengers, missing the expression of disappointment on the dark-eyed student’s face when Tegoshi didn’t even glance at him for the sixth bus ride in a row.
It was shaping up to be a good day. He wasn’t required to be in the lab, since the infected test subjects were all in the viral incubation period, and so all he had to do was work through hours of mindless paperwork and menial office tasks before he could go off in search of Massu at lunch break. He had a brief chat with Koyama over the photocopier again, but spent most of the time at his computer, in his own office, away from all the people he preferred not to see.
At one o’clock, he made his way down a couple of floors, to the level where he knew Massu was working. He hit another strike of luck when the doors of the elevator opened to reveal just the person he was looking for, and Massu climbed in, greeting Tegoshi with another of his knee-weakening smiles.
“Going to lunch?” Tegoshi asked, as Massu sidled in next to him. Privately, he was glad that they’d run into one another coincidentally; it felt much less like he was stalking him this way, more like they were almost-friends.
“Yeah. Do you want to…” Massu let his sentence trail off, but Tegoshi knew exactly what he meant, and he felt a surge of glee.
“Sure. It’s nice to have company.”
Conversation flowed more easily right from the start today, and they chatted naturally as they rode the elevator down.
“So… do you know any other places around here like that one we went to last week?” Massu sounded so hopeful that Tegoshi had to bite back a grin. “Cafeteria food is never that great, no matter where you buy it.”
“You like food?” Tegoshi asked, ushering him out of the building and then motioning for them to go down a side alley. Massu gave him a strange look that seemed to say ‘everyone likes food’, and Tegoshi amended himself. “I mean, you’re interested in food?”
“Aah.” Massu looked contemplative. “I guess so. I like to try different dishes, and I like to read recipes. I can’t really cook well though.” He finished with an awkward laugh.
“You’re really something.” Tegoshi chuckled, and then continued before Massu could express offence, “Well, I know plenty of places around here. I never eat at the cafeteria either.”
He hadn’t really thought about it until now, but over the years, Tegoshi had built up quite an impressive list of places to eat around the area. He liked wandering around, as far as his half hour lunch break would allow him to go, trying new places and experiencing the atmospheres of the different shops. It was a nice way to take a break, to experience a different world for a short thirty minutes.
But now, with Massu, he could share all the little gems he’d discovered, instead of constantly searching for new ones to pass the time and provide distraction.
Massu seemed delighted by the little hole in the wall ramen shop Tegoshi introduced him to - “I’m fussy about my ramen, so this place must be really good,” he told Massu with his serious face on, which made Massu laugh for some reason - and Tegoshi could barely concentrate on the flavor of his food, enthralled as he was by the blissful expression on Massu’s face as he ate.
“We should meet up on the weekend sometime,” Tegoshi suggested out of the blue, and Massu paused to stare at him, noodles hanging from his mouth.
“You’re really forward,” he said bluntly once he’d swallowed them, which Tegoshi chose to take as a compliment. Massu’s lips twisted into a sort of pout, looking almost regretful, before he continued, “that would be nice, but I do a lot of work on the weekends too. So, I don’t really know if it’s…” He trailed off, shrugging.
Maybe he’d asked too soon, Tegoshi thought. It was hard to know whether that had been a polite rejection, or if it had been the honest truth. Only one way to find out, really.
“Let’s exchange numbers at least, just in case,” he pressed, and Massu raised an eyebrow.
“Pushy,” he said, but it was with a grin, and he was already reaching for his phone. Tegoshi had to resist pumping his fist in triumph.
As it turned out, Tegoshi had completely forgotten his wallet in his haste to leave work, and Massu ended up paying for both their meals again.
“Sorry,” Tegoshi apologized as they left the store. “I’ll pay you back for it when we get to work.”
They walked the way they’d come, quickening their pace once they noticed the time.
“It’s okay,” Massu assured him. “We can go somewhere else next Wednesday, and you can buy lunch.”
“Okay.” Tegoshi didn’t bother trying to keep a straight face, cheeks bunching up and eyes curving into crescent moons as his lips spread into a smile. “I’ll make sure to choose somewhere cheap.”
“Hey,” Massu said, but there was no real warning in his voice, and Tegoshi found himself thinking that Massu must have finally cottoned on to his sense of humor.
They fell into a routine after that, meeting in the lobby at lunch break every Wednesday, and going to eat together, sometimes to the same place twice in a row if there were two things on the menu that Massu particularly fancied. On these days they spent together, Tegoshi found that he was barely squeamish at all when he was infecting people down in the lab. Thursdays were always the worst, and breakfast never really went down on those mornings - or if it did, it didn’t stay down - but they were nowhere near as bad as every other day had been before Massu had come into his life.
It made him feel a little guilty, that he was pushing what he was doing to the back of his mind, feeling okay when he was effectively taking the lives of other people away, but the little taste of happiness was addictive, and he was unwilling to let go of it.
He could probably be happier; he was pretty sure he’d been much happier than this back in nursing school, when there hadn’t been debts and secrets and lies looming above his head, but things were a damn sight better now than they had been for the past 26 months.
It was the little things that really made his day now. The way he’d sat next to, rather than across from Massu at lunch today, thighs touching without any awkwardness, was a good example. It was certainly enough to get Tegoshi through the following night; he was dealing with his backlog of reports and paperwork, after a busy few days at the lab, and it didn’t look like he’d be seeing the end of it until midnight. His mother had brought his car down for him earlier in the evening, though, and so all in all, he barely felt like he had anything to complain about.
By the time 11:40 ticked around on the clock, his back was a little sore and his eyes weren’t focusing properly, but he’d sorted his last bits of paper and typed the last word, and it looked like he could finally leave.
The office was eerily quiet, and though there were more than likely a few other staff members left in the building, Tegoshi suspected there weren’t any other people left on the floor. Koyama had stopped by earlier to say goodbye and tell him to take care of himself, and he knew Miyagi had gone home several hours before.
Tegoshi stood up and stretched, cricking his neck and grabbing his briefcase. He switched the light off and headed out into the hallway, humming to himself, but stopped abruptly when he thought he heard the muted shuffling of shoes on carpet, and frowned. That was odd; who from this floor would still be working at this time of night?
He followed the sound down the hall, around to where the elevator down to the underground lab was, surprised by who he found there.
“Massu?”
Massu practically leapt a foot in the air, spinning around with a look of surprise on his face.
“Tegoshi?”
Tegoshi frowned, cocking his head. “What are you doing here?”
Massu’s face was shadowed in the dim after hours light, making it difficult to read his expression, but even so, Tegoshi thought he looked a little uncomfortable.
“The photocopier downstairs broke, so I came up to use the one here.” He showed Tegoshi his armfuls of paper. “But the elevator isn’t working. I’ve been trying to get out for a while, but everyone’s gone.”
Tegoshi couldn’t help but giggle at the pitiful almost-whine in his voice.
“Wrong elevator. This one only goes up to the high-rise floors. The other ones are down that way.” It was a blatant lie, but one he’d had pounded into him, should he ever be asked about it.
“Ah.” Massu ducked his head, looking embarrassed, and Tegoshi couldn't help but laugh again. “I've never been on this floor, so I don't know my way around at all.”
He followed Tegoshi down the corridor to the main elevators, neither of them speaking as they padded along the carpet. Tegoshi hit the down button, lighting up bright neon red in the dark, and the two of them waited, watching the screen above the doors count floor numbers.
“What's the time?” Massu asked out of the blue.
Tegoshi fished his cell phone from his pocket.
“Nearly midnight,” he said, noticing Massu's face twist into an expression of displeasure. “Have you missed your train?”
Massu nodded, mouth turned down at the edges in a frustrated grimace.
“I'm not good with technology, but I didn't think it'd take me that long to figure out how to print double-sided copies.”
The elevator dinged, announcing its arrival, and they stepped in, Massu following Tegoshi.
“I've got my car with me today. Do you need a lift home?”
Massu laughed awkwardly.
“I don't think you want to do that if you plan to sleep tonight. I live a two hour commute away.”
“Oh...”
“I'll just pay for a room somewhere. I don't mind,” Massu assured him. “But wearing the same clothes two days in a row is a bit gross. Especially underpants.”
They walked the distance to the parking lot where Tegoshi's car was, and Tegoshi nibbled his bottom lip, what he was about to ask seeming too forward, even for him. Ultimately, though, that had never stopped him before, and it didn’t this time either.
“Why don't you come home with me? You can borrow our washing machine and hang your clothes out before bed.”
They stopped by Tegoshi's car. Massu's lips parted, and his expression was uncertain, and Tegoshi had to resist pushing for an answer.
He could've jumped for joy when Massu finally replied with, “Would that be okay?”
“Of course!” Tegoshi didn't think to hide his excitement. “Better than spending money on a hotel, right?”
“And wearing day-old underpants,” Massu added.
There was evident distaste in his voice, which was somewhat amusing. Something about the way Massu seemed so hung up about it made Tegoshi think that he was a little finicky about hygiene. The realization pleased him; he felt like he was slowly building up the jigsaw of Massu's personality, more and more appearing in the picture as time went on.
“Shall we go then?” Tegoshi asked, and Massu nodded, walking around to the passenger side of the car and climbing in.
Tegoshi put the radio on once he'd pulled out onto the road, singing along and tapping the steering wheel to the beat whenever they came to a stop at some lights.
He noticed Massu grinning at him out of the corner of his eye part way through the drive, and couldn't help asking about it.
“What? Am I singing off key?”
Massu let out a full belly laugh that made Tegoshi tingle with warmth.
“No, it's just you're quite different from what Ryo told me.”
It took Tegoshi a few moments to figure out that Massu meant Nishikido Ryo, surprised the two of them were on a first name basis already.
“What did Nishikido-san say about me?”
“Not much,” Massu admitted, “just the first day you and I met, he said you were the quiet type, that you kept to yourself.”
Tegoshi went quiet, focusing his attention back on the road.
Massu was right, he wasn't anything like what Ryo had described, but he could see why everyone at work would think he was. At work, the real Tegoshi was buried under layers of resentment and loathing and protective barriers.
“I'm more serious when I'm on the job,” he finally settled on saying, because it was true; he was just leaving out all the important reasons as to why.
His mother was still up when they arrived, a little later than Tegoshi had originally planned, because they’d gone on a search for a store that was still open where they could buy a toothbrush for Massu - he wouldn’t be able to sleep if he couldn’t brush his teeth before bed, and he certainly wasn’t going to use anyone else’s, he’d said - and Tegoshi briefly introduced Massu to her, before whisking him away to his room.
“I don't think any clothes I own would fit you.” Tegoshi put down his briefcase and threw his wallet on to the table, then went rifling through his closer for a bathrobe to offer Massu. “So if you want to take that and give me your things, I'll put them in the wash for you.”
“Thank you.” Massu accepted it from him.
“I’ll come back to get your clothes in a moment.” Tegoshi said, then stepped out of the room to give Massu some privacy.
He went to the kitchen while he was waiting, checking the leftovers from dinner that his mother had left out for him to make sure there was enough for Massu as well, then putting enough rice for two into the cooker. He went to check on Massu once he’d switched it on, his knock on the door followed by some rustling and shuffling.
“Just a moment!”
There was a bit more shuffling, before Massu opened the door, dressed in the robe, and Tegoshi greeted him with a raised eyebrow.
“You take a while to get changed, Massu,” he said, and Massu’s smile turned shy.
“I tried to take off my pants before my shoes and I got kind of stuck,” he replied, and Tegoshi thought he saw a flush crawling up Massu’s neck from under his robe.
He looked a little offended when Tegoshi sniggered at him, but quickly cheered up when he was offered dinner.
Massu stayed in the dining room, chatting with Tegoshi’s mother, while Tegoshi hung up his suit jacket and pants for him and put the rest of his clothes in the laundry. He couldn’t help but note that today, Massu’s boxers were garish shades of pink and green that clashed hideously with each other. It made him shake his head fondly as he tipped laundry powder into the machine and turned it on.
He joined in the conversation with his mother and Massu until their dinner was ready, and Tegoshi served it up while his mother offered to go and make Massu’s futon for him.
“Oh… thank you,” he said, sounding almost surprised by their hospitality, but Tegoshi’s mother shook her head.
“It’s been a while since Yuya’s had a friend over. I wish I’d known you were coming earlier so I could have cooked for three. I really hope there’s enough food.”
“I checked, mom. There’s enough,” Tegoshi assured her, shooting Massu a look that said, ‘mothers…’
“Okay. But if Yoshimoto-kun is still hungry afterwards, make sure to make him a snack.”
“Your mother’s very nice. It makes me miss mine,” Massu said once she'd left the room and the two of them had sat down to eat. “I haven’t been home to see her in a while. I really miss her cooking.”
That was cute, Tegoshi thought. Massu must be a mama's boy.
“Don't worry, my mother's a really good cook. You'll enjoy it,” Tegoshi assured him without a hint of shame or recognition that he might be bragging.
They began eating and Massu assured Tegoshi that he was right, and it was really good, and then when Tegoshi's mother came down to say that his futon was ready and that she was going to bed, he repeated the compliment.
“Oh, no, not at all,” she said, obviously not who Tegoshi had inherited his sense of modesty from. “But I'm glad you think so. I'll see you two in the morning. Go to bed soon, Yuya, it's almost half past one.”
“I will,” Tegoshi assured her. “Good night.”
Massu said good night too, then took a mouthful of his dinner and chewed with a thoughtful look on his face.
“Your dad's quite late. When’s he getting home?” He commented once he'd swallowed, and Tegoshi froze up for a second.
“Oh, that's...” He shrugged helplessly, staring down at his food with none of the usual enthusiasm he had around Massu. “I don't really... I mean, he doesn't live with us anymore. I don't really know where he is.”
Massu stared at him with his mouth partially open, slowly flushing red with shame.
“I'm sorry. I didn't mean... Well, you know,” he laughed uncomfortably, then cringed again. “I'm sorry, it's not funny, I just...”
Tegoshi smiled gently.
“You're awkward, Massu,” he said, keeping his voice light. “It's okay, seriously. You didn't know.”
Massu didn't say anything, stuffing his mouth so he wouldn't have to think of anything to say, but Tegoshi continued to talk normally, and soon the atmosphere lightened up again.
Dinner together felt very similar to their lunch break excursions; relaxed and easy, with casual conversation and laughter, even despite Massu's little slip-up. Tegoshi caught himself thinking a couple of times that it felt like they were dating or living together, and he had to shake the thoughts from his head. Still, it was hardly an unpleasant idea.
They did the washing up together, bumping elbows as they scrubbed and dried the plates, and Tegoshi had to fight off further thoughts about how it felt like they were a couple.
They got to bed a little before two, Massu going off to sleep in the tatami room on his futon, and Tegoshi to his own room after hanging Massu’s laundry out to dry. He felt a little off as he was changing into his pajamas, but it took him until he was lying in bed with the light out before he realized exactly what was wrong.
Without Massu right here with him to take his mind off things, it was harder to get his mind off thoughts of his father.
Tegoshi didn’t think about him directly anymore, but he was still present in almost every day of his life. Tegoshi was never sure whether to resent him or miss him, whether to feel sad or angry that he was gone. It’d been so sudden, without so much as a goodbye; two and a half years ago, Tegoshi had honestly thought that after Miyagi Pharmaceutics had bought out his father’s smaller failing company and paid off their debts, that their problems were finally over. His father had been offered a stable position working for the corporation, Tegoshi had been able to stay in nursing school and they no longer risked losing the food from their table or the roof from over their heads.
And then one day, his dad’s suitcase and a few of his personal belongings and clothes had just disappeared, and he’d never come back. Tegoshi and his mother had been distraught, couldn’t understand why, just when things were looking up, he’d take off like that.
It hurt, being abandoned. It would be nice to be able to forget, but when he was trapped at the company, unable to blame anyone but his father for it, it was impossible to put him out of his mind. His father’s memory was like a ghost haunting him, which was unnervingly fitting, because Tegoshi was fairly certain that he was dead.
No one had told him directly, but he was doubtless that his father had originally been in the position Tegoshi was in now, working for the business for low wages to pay off the debts they’d covered for him, burdened by the terrible secret that lay in the company basement, beneath floors of steel and concrete.
“You must understand that confidentiality on this topic is of the utmost importance,” they’d told him, on that last day he’d spent as an innocent, wide-eyed nursing student. “You don’t want to end up like your father.”
Tegoshi was a smart boy, had always been a smart boy, and he’d been able to put two and two together. He understood now why his father had disappeared, understood too well, and wished that, like his mother, he could’ve spent the rest of his life wondering instead.
He woke up to Massu’s voice the next morning, softly rousing him from sleep.
“Your mother says to tell you breakfast is nearly ready,” he said, and Tegoshi blinked heavy eyelids, slowly recalling the events of the previous day.
“Okay,” he replied dozily, words thick on his sluggish tongue. “I’m coming.”
Massu was already dressed in his suit, looking at fresh faced as ever. Must be a morning person, Tegoshi thought, a little enviously, watching him leave the room. Tegoshi wasn’t a morning person in even the broadest sense of the word; not until after his first cup of coffee anyway.
He showered and dressed quickly, then went to organize his briefcase and wallet as he usually did. He dug through the piles of things on his desk, a frown slowly spreading across his face as his search turned up fruitless. He couldn't find his wallet anywhere, and he was sure he'd left it on his desk last night.
Tegoshi glanced at his wall clock, wincing at the time. As if on cue, his mother poked her head around the door.
“Yuya? Are you okay? Breakfast's ready.”
Tegoshi flashed her a strained smile.
“Sorry, I’m coming soon. I just can’t find my wallet.”
He ended up sitting through another brief ‘I wish you’d be more cautious with your things’ lecture, before his mother told him to give up and come downstairs.
“You two will miss the bus otherwise, and you can’t make Yoshimoto-kun late. I’ll give you some money for your bus fare and lunch, okay?”
With his regular swipe card hanging around his neck, there were no excuses for Tegoshi to keep looking. He couldn’t tell his mother that he had another card, hidden in his wallet, which he’d get into enormous trouble at work for losing. All he could do now was cling to the groundless hope that maybe he wouldn’t have to go down to the lab today. He knew it was close to impossible that he wouldn’t be required to go down there, since they had infected test subjects a couple of weeks ago who he expected were now ready to receive the trial cure.
He tried to keep up a cheerful appearance during breakfast anyway, and found that it wasn’t so hard with Massu there, smiling and chatting with him and his mother like he’d been coming over all his life.
“Do you have enough money for the bus?” Tegoshi’s mother asked Massu as he and Tegoshi were getting ready to leave, and trying to force 500 yen into his hand when he didn’t seem sure.
“She likes you,” Tegoshi told him once they were out of the house, walking down the pavement. It made the short trip to the bus stop more pleasant, having someone beside him, taking his mind off the day ahead.
“Does she?” Massu sounded pleased. “I’m glad.”
It felt good, sitting together on the bus. It was the closest they’d ever been, Tegoshi realized, squashed up next to each other, shoulders nestled firmly together and thighs touching. Once again, he paid no mind to the brunet law student when he got onto the bus, too focused on Massu and their conversation to notice the young man’s disappointed, envious expression.
Once they’d gotten off the bus and arrived at the doors of the company building, Massu stopped and pulled out his cellphone.
“I have to go now,” he said, before his eyes flicked down to check his messages. “But thank you again for letting me stay last night.”
“Where are you off to?” Tegoshi asked, completely overlooking any ‘you’re welcome’s or ‘it was no trouble’s.
“The other lab. I don’t work here on Thursdays.” Almost as if on cue, his phone went off. “I’ll see you next Wednesday.”
Tegoshi watched him leave, approaching a car that had pulled up to the sidewalk, then climbing in. From where he was standing, Tegoshi could easily make out Ryo in the driver’s seat, feeling a twist of something dark and nasty flare up in his stomach when Ryo reached out to put a hand on Massu’s shoulder. He turned away, heading into the building; jealousy was the last thing he needed right now.
He was met with a stroke of luck when it was time to start work. It didn’t seem like it at the time when Miyagi told him that yes, he was needed in the lab today, and Tegoshi couldn’t bring himself to say that he had no means of getting down there.
He almost fainted with relief when he walked out of the office, almost right into Suzuki-sensei. Tegoshi had never been so happy to see him in his life.
“Good morning, Tegoshi-kun,” he greeted him, and for once, Tegoshi actually responded with real feeling. “I assume Miyagi-san has already told you that we need your assistance.”
Tegoshi nodded, and Suzuki beckoned for him to come along, and Tegoshi followed on legs shaky with relief.
He started coming to work earlier over the next week, making sure he got there at the same time as the scientists so he could catch the elevator down with them, and almost danced for joy when he was told he wouldn’t be needed in the lab for the first half of the next week.
The fact that he still couldn’t find his wallet made him a little less enthusiastic, however. He’d practically turned his room upside down in his search for it, and it was a total mess as a result. He’d planned to tidy it up a bit over the weekend, but that hadn’t come to pass, and there was always the worry that he might be called down to the lab without warning.
His heart sank on Monday when he went into Miyagi’s office and was informed that there was a pile of reports he needed to go and fetch from the laboratory, up until he was told that he could borrow the company car to fetch them.
“Koyama-kun has a high fever today, and can’t come in to work, so I’d appreciate it if you could go and collect them,” Miyagi said, while Tegoshi tried desperately not to let it show on his face how relieved he was.
“Are they expecting me now?” He asked, unable to help the celebratory smile that came over his face when the answer was yes.
> go to part 2
From: budiamond
Title: What It Seems (part 1)
Rating: PG-15
Pairing: Tegoshi-centric; Tegoshi/Massu (one-sided), Massu/Ryo
Warnings: Unethical scientific practices, dark themes
Summary: They were worthless nobodies whose lives had long since been taken out of their own hands. In many ways, Tegoshi’s situation wasn’t much different.
Notes: track_04! I tried to give you a dark(ish) Tegoshi-centric AU with Massu/Ryo, but I quickly learned that such a combination is difficult to pull off. It’s possibly a bit ridiculous, but I hope that you can still enjoy it a little♥
“The dregs of society,” they'd called them, on that first fateful day when he'd been taken behind closed doors and given the information that had subsequently trapped him there. They were worthless nobodies who no one cared for and everyone turned a blind eye to; the people whose lives had long since been taken out of their own hands.
In many ways, his situation wasn’t much different.
Of course, unlike them, he was free to come and go as he pleased - it was actually preferred that he not get in the way during observation periods, and he in turn had no desire to stay - but to all intents and purposes, he was as trapped and scared and hopeless as they were. Just like them, he had no way out.
---
Tegoshi Yuya eyed his reflection critically. Upon closer inspection, the new suit seemed a little too tight on him, but he had no option other than to wear it now. His usual suit had developed a hole, and if the choice came down to either wearing holey clothes, or having his crotch framed for all the world to see, he was going with the latter option.
His mother was just laying breakfast on the table as he came out into the dining room, and, same as he did every morning, Tegoshi breathed in deep, hoping that the lingering smell of cooking food would make him feel at least somewhat hungry.
“Good morning, Yuya.” His mother spoke without turning around as she put the last plate, stacked high with the dressed leafy greens that were all Tegoshi could manage some mornings, onto a placemat.
“Morning.” He slid into his usual chair, still trying to will up an appetite.
His mother sat across from him, spooning food onto her plate, and he followed her example, knowing from experience that he wouldn’t finish it all.
Never mind, he told himself, the same way he did every weekday. He ate properly on the weekends, when he didn’t have to think about work. When his stomach was more settled.
He avoided the baby tomatoes in the salad; hadn’t been able to eat them since the first time he’d bitten into one after he’d begun his new job. He’d liked them in the past, but now, the way they popped in his mouth and spilt their insides all over his tongue made him think of bursting blood vessels and rupturing organs. It had been enough to send him running to the bathroom.
Then again, he thought idly, chewing away on a mouthful of baby spinach leaves, perhaps he was desensitized now. He’d long since stopped saying sorry each time he slipped the point of a needle under skin and pushed down on the syringe - not that he didn’t feel sorry, it was just easier to ignore it now than it once had been. They were always too frightened to hear him, anyway.
“Have you got much to do at work today?” His mother asked, cutting through his thoughts.
“I’m not sure. I’ll find out.” Tegoshi shrugged and forced a smile. It was all he could really say.
He’d never been good at lying, and had been forced to become a master of evasion as a consequence. In the beginning he’d made up stories to ease his mother’s mind, about arranging meetings and the friends he was making at work, but in the end, he’d lost track of them. It was easier, he’d concluded, to keep secrets than to tell lies.
As usual, Tegoshi picked at his breakfast until it was time to go, then pushed his plate away, still half full, thanking his mother for cooking.
It was a struggle for him to leave the house during the week; the moment when he stepped from the soothing comfort of his home and began the walk down the path to the bus stop always felt like the true beginning of a new work day. It was a moment he liked to postpone for as long as possible, but, as inevitable as the yearly onset of winter, it always came. After all, he was well aware that the consequences of missing work would be far worse than the days he endured there.
He got to the bus stop at the same time as the bus, cutting it close as always, and climbed in the backdoor, sliding into an empty seat and settling his briefcase at his feet.
He caught the same young man that he saw on the bus every day - the one with short, brown hair and dark eyes, who always had a heavy bag of law books - trying to sneak glances at him surreptitiously, and Tegoshi shot him a smile, holding back a chuckle when the man blushed cherry red and looked away fast enough to give himself whiplash.
They’d never met, but he was pretty sure that the guy had a crush on him; Tegoshi had always been good at identifying other man-liking men - it was a gift - and while he felt a little bad for teasing him, he didn’t feel bad enough to stop. It was like an adult game of peek-a-boo, and god knows he needed a bit of fun and games in his life.
High-rise buildings rose up in front of them as they approached the city, and soon enough Tegoshi could see his company building too; a looming, twisted structure of glass, concrete and steel. The young man got off at the same stop as all the other university students, and Tegoshi knew from years of catching the same bus into town that they were only another stop away from his own.
It always felt like he was walking into prison when he entered the sliding doors of the building, closing behind him with a hum and an ominous click. It sounded nothing like the clang of a cell door, but to him, the feeling was the same.
He greeted the receptionist with a nod as he walked past her, digging his swipe card out of his pocket and catching the elevator up to the 16th floor.
It looked so misleadingly ordinary up here, like any other company building, with its off-white walls and beige carpets, and Tegoshi thought it was unfairly deceptive. He’d always been the type to believe that things should look the way they were, but the bland interior gave nothing away.
Tegoshi left his things in his office - it had been his father’s just over two years ago, but the thought was hardly a happy one - and then, steeling himself, he went next door to see Miyagi-san.
He knocked on the door, waiting a moment before pushing it ajar.
“May I come in?”
Whenever Tegoshi spoke to Miyagi, it was always with the utmost politeness. To anyone who didn't know, it would sound like he was being extra humble and subservient to the CEO. To those who knew him better, it was obvious that Tegoshi used the formal register to seem distant and cold; polite to the point that it was almost rude, without a thing anyone could do about it.
“Please come in, Tegoshi-kun.”
Like the building, Miyagi’s appearance was deceptively normal. Thinning hair and lightly etched wrinkles around the skin of his eyes and mouth betrayed his age, and he wore his impeccable, expensive suit like any other chief executive.
Before meeting him, Tegoshi had imagined monsters to be hideous, deformed creatures, like the spirits from folklore or the ogre masks worn during the bean-throwing festival. But that was something else he’d had to learn. Monsters could take any form; even the form of an elderly man with thin, wire-framed glasses and a well-tailored suit.
The same as every morning, they got right to business. In the beginning, Miyagi had attempted to build a good rapport between them, just for the sake of it, but Tegoshi hadn’t been interested and there was no way to change that. He viewed the man as his captor, and idle chat about weather, family and hobbies seemed like a joke. Bright-eyed, friendly Koyama, Miyagi’s other personal assistant, couldn’t understand his attitude; he found it perplexing that Tegoshi refused to go on company trips or come out for a drink in the evenings - that he refused to have anything to do with his job outside of work hours. In Koyama’s opinion, they were treated rather well, and even if Tegoshi had had the heart to let him know otherwise, he didn’t have the option.
Like so many of the other employees, Koyama was blind to the inner workings of the company. He handled the harmless, everyday files, took the innocent phone calls, arranged meetings with the upstanding, squeaky clean organizations… then again, if he’d gotten his hands on any of the files Tegoshi dealt with, he’d never have known the difference.
“I’m good with people, so I make a good secretary,” Koyama had admitted to him early in the job, “but I don’t have a medical background or anything, so I wouldn’t be able to figure out what to do with the reports you organize. I guess that’s why he needs you for them, right? You went to medical school, didn’t you?”
Tegoshi had smiled, a little wistfully.
“I was actually training to be a nurse,” he’d said, “but my father used to own a pharmaceutical company.”
He’d left it there, as though that gave him any idea of how pharmaceutics worked and what the paperwork he handled said. In reality, he couldn’t understand the reports either, but it would seem less suspicious if Koyama thought that he could. It actually was his nurse training - despite never having finished the program - that made him valuable to them; that and his financial ties to the company that wouldn’t allow him leave.
The situation was no fault of his own, but that didn’t matter. It still gave Miyagi full power over him, and Tegoshi was helpless to fight back.
“We’ve reached what Suzuki-sensei hopes is a breakthrough with the vaccine. They’ll be running some new tests today, so you’re needed in the lab by nine.”
Tegoshi nodded mechanically, but couldn’t help the twisting sensation in his stomach or the feeling of nausea that crept through his body like a disease.
“And will my services be required up here as well?” He asked, using the humblest language he could muster.
“You’ll need to be out for the observations at one o’clock. Get some lunch then, and be up here by half past. I have some meetings I need you to arrange.”
“Of course.” Tegoshi smiled, sweet and obedient, all lips and no teeth. It was the fakest smile in his repertoire, but that was the whole point of it. There were few ways he could express his loathing for the company and everyone involved in its back alley work. If fake smiles and too-polite words were all he had at his disposal, then he’d use them.
It always felt good to leave Miyagi’s office, even if the place he was going next wasn’t much better. It was a crushing, suffocating feeling to be around someone who had absolute power over you, and it left him with the uneasy sensation that the floor could be ripped out from beneath his feet at any moment.
Back in his office, he took his wallet from his briefcase and dug through the pocket where he kept his cards. Tegoshi had two swipe cards for getting around inside the building; the one he kept around his neck during the day was the regular one that most employees had; it was the same one Koyama used to get to the 16th floor in the morning and start work, the same one the office ladies had to bring tea to the other members of staff.
The second one he kept hidden in plain sight in his wallet in the form of an expired library card. No one ever looked twice at it, which was the general idea. That card let Tegoshi get to places in the building that very few people had access to - places that very few people knew existed.
The ride down to the laboratory always gave him chills. A few years ago, he’d been known amongst his friends for being happy-go-lucky and difficult to unnerve. Now to make him ill at ease, all it took were the grinding gears of the elevator, and the mechanical beep as it counted off each floor it passed.
If Tegoshi had ever been asked to imagine a lab where illegal experiments were taking place before he’d been stuck in this whole mess, he probably would’ve imagined a dank, dark place with broken pipes and dripping water; strangely-colored, fizzing concoctions in glass beakers and rusty, unkempt medical equipment.
As it was, the lab was spotlessly clean, with high-tech machines and no uncovered chemical substances of any sort. The only things that he would’ve imagined correctly were the stretchers, with their straps and buckles and harnesses. He tried not to look at them when he could help it. They made him feel sick.
He could understand why, on that first day he'd been brought down here, they'd justified it the way they had. He didn't want to be like them, felt a little disgusted with himself whenever he used their words to comfort himself, but they were the one thing that got him to sleep at night.
“It’s only the people nobody would miss anyway.”
Homeless people, teenage runaways, worthless, insignificant people without family or friends. They were just sacrificing the nobodies to save the somebodies.
He knew he would never truly believe that that made it okay, and he didn't want to either - wouldn't be able to forgive himself if he did - but it made it easier to stomach what he was doing if he thought of them as insignificant, people without names or identities.
It was getting closer to flu season now, which was always a busy time in the lab. It meant more work for Tegoshi, more terrified, pleading eyes, begging him not to come near them with the needle, but at the same time, it was a relief.
The first year he'd begun working down here, they'd been commissioned by a sector of the government to research a vaccine for the Marburg virus after a suspected breakout in a Tokyo hospital. It was the first time he’d worked in the bio safety level 4 section of the lab. He’d gone through training in there in beginning in how to handle dangerous infectious agents and how the safety functions worked, just in case, but he’d never had any practical experience in there until that moment.
That section of the lab was used almost exclusively for research and very rarely for infecting and testing subjects, and it was hard for Tegoshi to believe that he wasn’t on a movie set as he walked through the airlock doors. He was instructed to shower and go through the ultraviolet room, then was put into a Hazardous Materials suit and watched carefully by the laboratory director the whole time.
He’d never heard of the Marburg virus before, and it was only a week later when he heard about the case at the hospital on the news that he found out anything about it.
Fortunately, the announcer on the news had said, it hadn’t been Marburg, but an outbreak of malaria instead, originating from a man who had recently come back from a holiday to Africa, then taken a turn for the worse a couple of days later.
It was all good news, the announcer had continued, informing viewers that all infected parties had been quarantined and were recovering comfortably, but by that point, Tegoshi had long stopped listening. He’d known in the back of his mind that it would be bad, that it wouldn’t have been dealt with in a level four bio safety lab if it hadn’t, but the words from her brief description of the Marburg virus - “hemorrhage, organ failure, delirium” - echoed in his ears, and he felt a wave of shock crash over him, followed by the slow onset of horror.
“It’s lucky it was something else.” His mother had looked up from her book to comment, but Tegoshi hadn’t been able to answer, because even if the case at the hospital had been a false alarm, he’d still infected half a dozen people with the real thing.
That night, he’d dreamed about vomiting up his liquefied internal organs and bleeding from every pore in his body.
Infecting test subjects with a simple case of influenza was almost a treat after that.
It wasn’t so much the fatality rate of the diseases that made his skin crawl, he thought, not for the first time, as he changed into his medical gown. Once they ceased to be useful, all subjects were terminated - the other personnel used the term ‘euthanize’, but Tegoshi didn’t see the point of trying to cover up such a glaringly ugly deed with a euphemism - to assure there was no leaking of information. It was the pain they went through prior to their deaths that bothered him.
“Ah, Tegoshi-kun. You’re already here. Good.”
He jerked in surprise, not having heard anyone come into the changing area.
“Suzuki-sensei.” He nodded his head in greeting, as shallowly as possible, then returned to fitting the disposable gloves over his hands.
“You’ll just be giving an anesthetic and administering the latest vaccine to six new subjects today. Regretfully, last weeks’ batch caused respiratory problems in all eight subjects, and one suffered a seizure, so we’re behind the projected schedule, but we think we’ve made a breakthrough.”
“I heard,” Tegoshi said, tone brusque.
He followed Suzuki-sensei out into the lab again and began to prepare the anesthetic. It was standard protocol, the scientists figuring that it was best if the people they were experimenting on weren’t fully aware that they’d been injected with, or exposed to, anything other than hypnotics. A calm test subject was a good test subject, after all, particularly if the observers needed to monitor for changes in their breathing patterns.
The first lab rat, strapped down and wheeled out on the stretcher, was a homeless girl. She’d been cleaned up for sanitary purposes, but it still showed in her tattered appearance - long nails in need of cutting, hair with ragged ends. But no matter where they came from, their eyes were always the same. He did his best to avoid meeting their gazes now, but even if he tried his hardest to stare fixedly at the needle and concentrate on the bare skin of their arms, he still couldn’t help but notice the fear in their faces. Couldn’t help but hear the muffled pleas and screams through their gags.
As always, the needle slipped under the skin without any problems, leaving nothing more than an almost invisible pinprick. It never failed to bring him back to his year and a half as a nursing trainee, when he’d been a fresh faced, naïve high school graduate with big ambitions and a rose-colored view of the world.
He always had been the best at giving injections.
---
Tegoshi didn’t expect that he’d be hungry, but he forced himself to eat when his lunch break started. He made his usual trip out of the building, deciding to buy a bento from the shop across the road today, then came back to eat alone in the cafeteria on the first floor. It was his policy not to buy lunch from their building, not wanting to put any more money into the company than necessary. One more little way of fighting back.
He had never been a big people watcher until he’d started this job - ‘harmlessly self-centered’ he’d been known as when he’d been in high school, and it had been a fairly accurate description - but he didn’t like having time to think anymore, and so his breaks were now spent intently watching the other employees as he ate.
He didn’t spend much time socializing, and so the majority of the faces surrounding him were unfamiliar, but he did spot Nishikido Ryo standing in line at the cafeteria.
From what Tegoshi had heard, the board of directors was considering letting him in on the company secret very soon. Barely scraping thirty, he already had a PhD in pharmaceutical science and a bachelors in microbiology, and had easily secured an important position in the company upon graduation. He was hailed as a young genius, and when he’d joined, everyone had said how lucky they’d been to snatch him up.
He spent most of his time at the company’s official Tokyo lab, but came to the main office once a month for meetings and report writing. If the board did decide to go ahead and bring him behind closed doors for a chat, though, Tegoshi would probably be seeing much more of him very soon.
He watched Ryo walk past with his lunch, wondering how long it would take him to hate the sight of his face as much as he hated Miyagi’s or Suzuki-sensei’s, and was completely unprepared for the shriek and clatter that followed when someone tripped on his table leg and knocked his bento box to the floor.
The culprit stared wide-eyed at the ground, clutching an empty tray that had, until that moment, held a bowl of the cafeteria’s udon noodles.
He looked back between Tegoshi’s surprised face and the mess on the linoleum, before his neck flushed red and he stuttered an apology, diving for the paper napkin that had fluttered to the floor when he’d, quite literally, lost his lunch.
Tegoshi watched as he tried in vain to mop up the spill with the tiny napkin, then smothered a giggle when he noticed that the man’s shirt had come untucked and that his boxers - from what he could see, a satin pair in an alarmingly bright rainbow hue - were visible, peeking out above the top of his pants.
The cleaners showed up a moment later, shooing the man away from the mess, telling him they’d take care of it.
He straightened up, appearing unsure of what to do, before facing Tegoshi and looking at him with a guilty expression.
“I’m sorry. I spilt your lunch. If you’d like, I can buy you a new one.”
Tegoshi felt himself smiling, the expression coming to his face with an unusual ease that he hadn’t experienced in what felt like forever.
“It’s okay. I wasn’t that hungry. But, uh… your shirt isn’t tucked in.”
The man looked confused for a moment, before realizing what had happened, and the flush that had crept down his neck earlier colored his face as well as he fixed his clothes.
“Thank you,” he said, and despite his embarrassment, smiled, little dimples appearing on each side of his mouth.
Tegoshi’s heart somersaulted.
“Yoshimoto-san?”
His thoughts were pulled from the endearing way the man’s bangs fell into his eyes and the sweet curve of his full lips by Ryo, who, he hadn’t noticed until now, had been standing by, waiting for the adorable stranger’s attention.
“Ah, Nishikido-san. I’m sorry.”
Ryo regarded Tegoshi with his piercing, dark eyes for a moment before they swept away from him, focusing on the other man again.
“I see you’ve met Tegoshi-san.”
Figuring that was his cue, Tegoshi stood up. He was painfully aware of his tight suit pants, but tried to ignore them, hoping that no one else would notice. He bowed slightly, flashing his most charming smile, which, once again, came surprisingly easily.
“I’m Tegoshi Yuya. I’m the CEO’s personal assistant. It’s nice to meet you.”
The man returned his smile, showing those gorgeous dimples again, and if Tegoshi had been the type to swoon, he certainly would have then.
“I’m Yoshimoto Ren,” he introduced himself. “But feel free to call me Massu. Everyone does.”
Tegoshi opened his mouth to reply, but stopped in mid motion, face taking on a quizzical look. He thought he saw a flash of panic cross Massu’s face for a second, before it was disappeared, replaced with a lopsided grin, accompanied by an awkward laugh.
“You must be wondering how I got that nickname, huh,” he said, chuckles taking on a nervous tone as he brought up exactly the point Tegoshi had just been considering. “Well… it’s a funny story, actually…”
He didn’t elaborate, though, standing there in an awkward silence while Tegoshi waited, feeling as though something was out of place.
“He was just telling me about that, actually.” Ryo stepped smoothly into the conversation. “Apparently it’s Massu, as in masu. You know. Like a trout. Supposedly he looked a bit like a fish back in high school.”
Massu and Ryo exchanged a look, one that Tegoshi couldn’t pinpoint the meaning behind, before Massu started to laugh again.
“Yeah. I don’t look like one anymore, though. Just when I eat. I have a kind of big mouth. Have you ever seen a dead trout? They’re kind of like this.”
He opened his mouth in an imitation of a dead fish, and for the second time that day, a giggle bubbled up from Tegoshi’s throat, followed by a small fit of laughter which Massu soon joined in on.
“You’re interesting,” Tegoshi said once he regained control of himself, his professionalism dissolving along with the brooding manner he usually possessed at work. “Interesting and a bit strange.”
Massu’s eyebrows knitted together, looking slightly offended, but Tegoshi hadn’t meant it in a bad way. Quite the opposite.
“We’d better be going.” Ryo spoke up again. “I still have to show Yoshimoto-san the rest of the building. If you’ll excuse us.”
“Maybe I’ll see you around, Tegoshi-san.” Massu waved to him. “I’ll pay you back for the lunch if I do.”
Tegoshi happily accepted the offer, waving to the two of them in farewell. He watched Massu leave the room, unaware that he had his hand pressed lightly to his chest.
He didn’t hang around the cafeteria long after Ryo and Massu left; he had things he needed to do.
Usually Tegoshi dragged his feet and made himself as inefficient as possible when he was doing the personal assistant part of his job, but today he worked quickly, leaving him time to nose around in the employee files - if there was one advantage to being the glorified whipping boy of the CEO, it was the access to things that his other co-workers may not have had.
From what he could see, Yoshimoto Ren had just started working at the company. He had a Masters in pharmaceutical science, and had come to the company to get some on the job experience before starting his PhD. He'd be working under Nishikido Ryo as an assistant for the duration of his time here, but had shown promise at some prestigious university in China that he'd transferred to partway through his undergraduate degree.
He was 27 years old, a good 6 years older than Tegoshi was, which was surprising given his youthful face, but not so surprising when you considered his qualifications.
It was a pity, he thought, that Massu would be spending the majority of his time with Ryo in the other lab, and not at the main company building where he had a greater chance of running into Tegoshi.
It wasn't just the promise of a free lunch that made him want to see Massu again. Tegoshi wasn't the type to try and fool himself; he knew he'd taken a more-than-friendly interest in him upon first glance, and there was no point in trying to deny it. Besides, what with the ease with which Massu had made him smile, Tegoshi knew he'd be a fool not to pursue his interest further.
Massu seemed so wonderfully open and genuine, so honest and simple, a spot of brightness in a world that had been dark for far too long. Tegoshi wanted - needed - that kind of brightness after two years of nothing but secrets and lies.
Of course, that Massu had a rather handsome face didn't hurt either. Tegoshi just hoped his rainbow boxers were a sign of his persuasion and not just a sign of someone with a bizarre sense of fashion.
And so in the following weeks, he and Massu certainly did see one another again, just not by chance. Tegoshi actively sought him out, checking up on Massu’s work timetable; which day he was scheduled to be here in the main building, what time, where - he had it all memorized. It seemed a little creepy when he stopped to think about it, but Tegoshi dismissed that. It was just him, after all, and he had his reasons; with the influenza vaccine well on its way to being ready to sell off to the government, the company had once again turned its eyes to cures and vaccines for more dangerous, harmful diseases. If there was a time when he’d need someone like Massu around, this was definitely it.
The second time they met, it was completely orchestrated by Tegoshi. Massu was in the main building for a weekly meeting with two of the department managers, and, true to his nature, Tegoshi didn’t even bother to make his presence seem like a coincidence; he just waited outside the room for the meeting to finish, and then once the managers had left, poked his head in and said hi.
Massu looked surprised for a moment, face scrunching up slightly as he presumably tried to recall where he knew Tegoshi’s face from, smoothing into a smile when it came back to him.
“Hello. Tegoshi-san, right?”
It hadn’t actually occurred to Tegoshi before now that Massu might not remember who he was, but he was certainly glad he did, and felt his lips spread into a grin.
“Yeah. Just Tegoshi is fine. So, are you on lunch break now?”
A brief flicker of what looked like suspicion crossed Massu’s features, and he looked puzzled, staring without saying a word. Tegoshi felt oddly like he was being scrutinized, and the atmosphere was just beginning to get uncomfortable when Massu was back to smiling and everything was normal again.
“I still owe you lunch, don’t I,” he said, and his expression was so warm and friendly that Tegoshi was almost convinced that he’d imagined Massu’s initial reaction. “Do you want to eat together?”
Honestly, Tegoshi had long forgotten that Massu had offered to buy him lunch the first time they’d met, but he nodded anyway. He wasn’t going to say no to a free meal.
They went to a quaint little shop down the street, and for the first time in a long time, Tegoshi didn't even have to try to distract himself so he could get his food down. Massu was enthralling - well, to be honest, Massu was actually a bit awkward. Tegoshi often found himself jumping in to fill gaps in the conversation when Massu suddenly ran out of things to say and plunged them into unnatural silence. But to Tegoshi, he was so interesting, so unique, that even these characteristics had a sort of charm to them.
It was only a short 20 minutes they were out together, but they really hit it off. Tegoshi felt Massu warm to him quickly, becoming visibly more comfortable as their break wore on, and he felt himself exposing more and more of his true nature to Massu, the old Tegoshi finally showing his face from behind the corporate mask.
“I was glad to see your suit was properly tucked in today,” he said, a mischievous smile curling his lips at the corners.
Massu flushed, but answered in a deadpan tone, “Yeah. And your pants fit you today.”
Tegoshi actually felt his face color a little as well, but he laughed it off. So Massu had noticed.
“I guess we've both improved over the last week.”
Massu chuckled, and Tegoshi experienced a tingle of pleasure from being the one to cause it. He felt an actual sense of disappointment when they reached the sliding glass doors of the company and had to go their separate ways.
“I guess I'll see you around.” Massu bid him farewell in the lobby.
Tegoshi nodded.
“Definitely. Let's have lunch together again some time,” he suggested, feeling warm when Massu smiled again and agreed.
His elation lasted all of ten minutes, before Miyagi called him into his office and told him he was needed in the lab. Tegoshi’s stomach clenched and he could feel the curry rice he’d eaten for lunch churn inside him as he left to get his swipe card. He tried to relax, concentrating on recalling his lunch with Massu to calm himself.
He thought about him all the way down in the elevator, and then, for the first time ever while sinking a needle into an arm of a terrified, unwilling test subject, with the memory of Massu’s low, comforting voice in his mind, Tegoshi actually felt okay.
---
It was a relief, he thought as he ate a full breakfast the next morning, to finally have something to ground and soothe him during difficult times. He felt a bit like a middle school student with a crush, but when he thought about Massu’s beaming smile and his dimples and crinkled eyes, it crowded out all his less pleasant thoughts.
“Were you very hungry this morning, Yuya?” His mother asked him as she took his plate from under his nose, with barely concealed delight in her voice.
Tegoshi looked at her blankly, not realizing for a second that he’d finished everything he’d put on his dish.
“Yeah,” he replied, after a brief moment of thought, “I guess I must have been.”
It felt like it was bordering on obsession, with the amount of time Tegoshi spent thinking about him, but he figured that if he was acting normally around Massu and didn’t mention how much he felt about him, it didn’t matter. What did matter was that Tegoshi finally had something to cling to, to get him through the day. Nothing had changed about his dirty, disgraceful job, but Massu’s presence in his life, whether abstract or tangible, was enough to change the way he handled it.
“You look happier recently,” his mother finally told him one morning before he left for work, an echo of something Koyama had said to him the other day in the copy room.
Tegoshi smiled. “There’s a lot to be happy about recently.”
He was trying his best to be cryptic, but his mother flashed him a knowing smile before dropping the topic. He was both glad and a little disappointed that she had. He half wanted to keep it all a secret, but also half wanted to talk non-stop about the person who’d captured his heart and brought some form of brightness back into his life.
It’d been a while since he’d felt either excitement or anticipation, but today as he rode the bus to work, he felt both of them at once. Today was Wednesday, the day that Tegoshi knew Massu spent at the main office building to do the written, company side of his work, as opposed to the practical side.
He stared out the window of the bus on his way to work, as had become habit for him over the past week, and didn’t pay any attention to the other passengers, missing the expression of disappointment on the dark-eyed student’s face when Tegoshi didn’t even glance at him for the sixth bus ride in a row.
It was shaping up to be a good day. He wasn’t required to be in the lab, since the infected test subjects were all in the viral incubation period, and so all he had to do was work through hours of mindless paperwork and menial office tasks before he could go off in search of Massu at lunch break. He had a brief chat with Koyama over the photocopier again, but spent most of the time at his computer, in his own office, away from all the people he preferred not to see.
At one o’clock, he made his way down a couple of floors, to the level where he knew Massu was working. He hit another strike of luck when the doors of the elevator opened to reveal just the person he was looking for, and Massu climbed in, greeting Tegoshi with another of his knee-weakening smiles.
“Going to lunch?” Tegoshi asked, as Massu sidled in next to him. Privately, he was glad that they’d run into one another coincidentally; it felt much less like he was stalking him this way, more like they were almost-friends.
“Yeah. Do you want to…” Massu let his sentence trail off, but Tegoshi knew exactly what he meant, and he felt a surge of glee.
“Sure. It’s nice to have company.”
Conversation flowed more easily right from the start today, and they chatted naturally as they rode the elevator down.
“So… do you know any other places around here like that one we went to last week?” Massu sounded so hopeful that Tegoshi had to bite back a grin. “Cafeteria food is never that great, no matter where you buy it.”
“You like food?” Tegoshi asked, ushering him out of the building and then motioning for them to go down a side alley. Massu gave him a strange look that seemed to say ‘everyone likes food’, and Tegoshi amended himself. “I mean, you’re interested in food?”
“Aah.” Massu looked contemplative. “I guess so. I like to try different dishes, and I like to read recipes. I can’t really cook well though.” He finished with an awkward laugh.
“You’re really something.” Tegoshi chuckled, and then continued before Massu could express offence, “Well, I know plenty of places around here. I never eat at the cafeteria either.”
He hadn’t really thought about it until now, but over the years, Tegoshi had built up quite an impressive list of places to eat around the area. He liked wandering around, as far as his half hour lunch break would allow him to go, trying new places and experiencing the atmospheres of the different shops. It was a nice way to take a break, to experience a different world for a short thirty minutes.
But now, with Massu, he could share all the little gems he’d discovered, instead of constantly searching for new ones to pass the time and provide distraction.
Massu seemed delighted by the little hole in the wall ramen shop Tegoshi introduced him to - “I’m fussy about my ramen, so this place must be really good,” he told Massu with his serious face on, which made Massu laugh for some reason - and Tegoshi could barely concentrate on the flavor of his food, enthralled as he was by the blissful expression on Massu’s face as he ate.
“We should meet up on the weekend sometime,” Tegoshi suggested out of the blue, and Massu paused to stare at him, noodles hanging from his mouth.
“You’re really forward,” he said bluntly once he’d swallowed them, which Tegoshi chose to take as a compliment. Massu’s lips twisted into a sort of pout, looking almost regretful, before he continued, “that would be nice, but I do a lot of work on the weekends too. So, I don’t really know if it’s…” He trailed off, shrugging.
Maybe he’d asked too soon, Tegoshi thought. It was hard to know whether that had been a polite rejection, or if it had been the honest truth. Only one way to find out, really.
“Let’s exchange numbers at least, just in case,” he pressed, and Massu raised an eyebrow.
“Pushy,” he said, but it was with a grin, and he was already reaching for his phone. Tegoshi had to resist pumping his fist in triumph.
As it turned out, Tegoshi had completely forgotten his wallet in his haste to leave work, and Massu ended up paying for both their meals again.
“Sorry,” Tegoshi apologized as they left the store. “I’ll pay you back for it when we get to work.”
They walked the way they’d come, quickening their pace once they noticed the time.
“It’s okay,” Massu assured him. “We can go somewhere else next Wednesday, and you can buy lunch.”
“Okay.” Tegoshi didn’t bother trying to keep a straight face, cheeks bunching up and eyes curving into crescent moons as his lips spread into a smile. “I’ll make sure to choose somewhere cheap.”
“Hey,” Massu said, but there was no real warning in his voice, and Tegoshi found himself thinking that Massu must have finally cottoned on to his sense of humor.
They fell into a routine after that, meeting in the lobby at lunch break every Wednesday, and going to eat together, sometimes to the same place twice in a row if there were two things on the menu that Massu particularly fancied. On these days they spent together, Tegoshi found that he was barely squeamish at all when he was infecting people down in the lab. Thursdays were always the worst, and breakfast never really went down on those mornings - or if it did, it didn’t stay down - but they were nowhere near as bad as every other day had been before Massu had come into his life.
It made him feel a little guilty, that he was pushing what he was doing to the back of his mind, feeling okay when he was effectively taking the lives of other people away, but the little taste of happiness was addictive, and he was unwilling to let go of it.
He could probably be happier; he was pretty sure he’d been much happier than this back in nursing school, when there hadn’t been debts and secrets and lies looming above his head, but things were a damn sight better now than they had been for the past 26 months.
It was the little things that really made his day now. The way he’d sat next to, rather than across from Massu at lunch today, thighs touching without any awkwardness, was a good example. It was certainly enough to get Tegoshi through the following night; he was dealing with his backlog of reports and paperwork, after a busy few days at the lab, and it didn’t look like he’d be seeing the end of it until midnight. His mother had brought his car down for him earlier in the evening, though, and so all in all, he barely felt like he had anything to complain about.
By the time 11:40 ticked around on the clock, his back was a little sore and his eyes weren’t focusing properly, but he’d sorted his last bits of paper and typed the last word, and it looked like he could finally leave.
The office was eerily quiet, and though there were more than likely a few other staff members left in the building, Tegoshi suspected there weren’t any other people left on the floor. Koyama had stopped by earlier to say goodbye and tell him to take care of himself, and he knew Miyagi had gone home several hours before.
Tegoshi stood up and stretched, cricking his neck and grabbing his briefcase. He switched the light off and headed out into the hallway, humming to himself, but stopped abruptly when he thought he heard the muted shuffling of shoes on carpet, and frowned. That was odd; who from this floor would still be working at this time of night?
He followed the sound down the hall, around to where the elevator down to the underground lab was, surprised by who he found there.
“Massu?”
Massu practically leapt a foot in the air, spinning around with a look of surprise on his face.
“Tegoshi?”
Tegoshi frowned, cocking his head. “What are you doing here?”
Massu’s face was shadowed in the dim after hours light, making it difficult to read his expression, but even so, Tegoshi thought he looked a little uncomfortable.
“The photocopier downstairs broke, so I came up to use the one here.” He showed Tegoshi his armfuls of paper. “But the elevator isn’t working. I’ve been trying to get out for a while, but everyone’s gone.”
Tegoshi couldn’t help but giggle at the pitiful almost-whine in his voice.
“Wrong elevator. This one only goes up to the high-rise floors. The other ones are down that way.” It was a blatant lie, but one he’d had pounded into him, should he ever be asked about it.
“Ah.” Massu ducked his head, looking embarrassed, and Tegoshi couldn't help but laugh again. “I've never been on this floor, so I don't know my way around at all.”
He followed Tegoshi down the corridor to the main elevators, neither of them speaking as they padded along the carpet. Tegoshi hit the down button, lighting up bright neon red in the dark, and the two of them waited, watching the screen above the doors count floor numbers.
“What's the time?” Massu asked out of the blue.
Tegoshi fished his cell phone from his pocket.
“Nearly midnight,” he said, noticing Massu's face twist into an expression of displeasure. “Have you missed your train?”
Massu nodded, mouth turned down at the edges in a frustrated grimace.
“I'm not good with technology, but I didn't think it'd take me that long to figure out how to print double-sided copies.”
The elevator dinged, announcing its arrival, and they stepped in, Massu following Tegoshi.
“I've got my car with me today. Do you need a lift home?”
Massu laughed awkwardly.
“I don't think you want to do that if you plan to sleep tonight. I live a two hour commute away.”
“Oh...”
“I'll just pay for a room somewhere. I don't mind,” Massu assured him. “But wearing the same clothes two days in a row is a bit gross. Especially underpants.”
They walked the distance to the parking lot where Tegoshi's car was, and Tegoshi nibbled his bottom lip, what he was about to ask seeming too forward, even for him. Ultimately, though, that had never stopped him before, and it didn’t this time either.
“Why don't you come home with me? You can borrow our washing machine and hang your clothes out before bed.”
They stopped by Tegoshi's car. Massu's lips parted, and his expression was uncertain, and Tegoshi had to resist pushing for an answer.
He could've jumped for joy when Massu finally replied with, “Would that be okay?”
“Of course!” Tegoshi didn't think to hide his excitement. “Better than spending money on a hotel, right?”
“And wearing day-old underpants,” Massu added.
There was evident distaste in his voice, which was somewhat amusing. Something about the way Massu seemed so hung up about it made Tegoshi think that he was a little finicky about hygiene. The realization pleased him; he felt like he was slowly building up the jigsaw of Massu's personality, more and more appearing in the picture as time went on.
“Shall we go then?” Tegoshi asked, and Massu nodded, walking around to the passenger side of the car and climbing in.
Tegoshi put the radio on once he'd pulled out onto the road, singing along and tapping the steering wheel to the beat whenever they came to a stop at some lights.
He noticed Massu grinning at him out of the corner of his eye part way through the drive, and couldn't help asking about it.
“What? Am I singing off key?”
Massu let out a full belly laugh that made Tegoshi tingle with warmth.
“No, it's just you're quite different from what Ryo told me.”
It took Tegoshi a few moments to figure out that Massu meant Nishikido Ryo, surprised the two of them were on a first name basis already.
“What did Nishikido-san say about me?”
“Not much,” Massu admitted, “just the first day you and I met, he said you were the quiet type, that you kept to yourself.”
Tegoshi went quiet, focusing his attention back on the road.
Massu was right, he wasn't anything like what Ryo had described, but he could see why everyone at work would think he was. At work, the real Tegoshi was buried under layers of resentment and loathing and protective barriers.
“I'm more serious when I'm on the job,” he finally settled on saying, because it was true; he was just leaving out all the important reasons as to why.
His mother was still up when they arrived, a little later than Tegoshi had originally planned, because they’d gone on a search for a store that was still open where they could buy a toothbrush for Massu - he wouldn’t be able to sleep if he couldn’t brush his teeth before bed, and he certainly wasn’t going to use anyone else’s, he’d said - and Tegoshi briefly introduced Massu to her, before whisking him away to his room.
“I don't think any clothes I own would fit you.” Tegoshi put down his briefcase and threw his wallet on to the table, then went rifling through his closer for a bathrobe to offer Massu. “So if you want to take that and give me your things, I'll put them in the wash for you.”
“Thank you.” Massu accepted it from him.
“I’ll come back to get your clothes in a moment.” Tegoshi said, then stepped out of the room to give Massu some privacy.
He went to the kitchen while he was waiting, checking the leftovers from dinner that his mother had left out for him to make sure there was enough for Massu as well, then putting enough rice for two into the cooker. He went to check on Massu once he’d switched it on, his knock on the door followed by some rustling and shuffling.
“Just a moment!”
There was a bit more shuffling, before Massu opened the door, dressed in the robe, and Tegoshi greeted him with a raised eyebrow.
“You take a while to get changed, Massu,” he said, and Massu’s smile turned shy.
“I tried to take off my pants before my shoes and I got kind of stuck,” he replied, and Tegoshi thought he saw a flush crawling up Massu’s neck from under his robe.
He looked a little offended when Tegoshi sniggered at him, but quickly cheered up when he was offered dinner.
Massu stayed in the dining room, chatting with Tegoshi’s mother, while Tegoshi hung up his suit jacket and pants for him and put the rest of his clothes in the laundry. He couldn’t help but note that today, Massu’s boxers were garish shades of pink and green that clashed hideously with each other. It made him shake his head fondly as he tipped laundry powder into the machine and turned it on.
He joined in the conversation with his mother and Massu until their dinner was ready, and Tegoshi served it up while his mother offered to go and make Massu’s futon for him.
“Oh… thank you,” he said, sounding almost surprised by their hospitality, but Tegoshi’s mother shook her head.
“It’s been a while since Yuya’s had a friend over. I wish I’d known you were coming earlier so I could have cooked for three. I really hope there’s enough food.”
“I checked, mom. There’s enough,” Tegoshi assured her, shooting Massu a look that said, ‘mothers…’
“Okay. But if Yoshimoto-kun is still hungry afterwards, make sure to make him a snack.”
“Your mother’s very nice. It makes me miss mine,” Massu said once she'd left the room and the two of them had sat down to eat. “I haven’t been home to see her in a while. I really miss her cooking.”
That was cute, Tegoshi thought. Massu must be a mama's boy.
“Don't worry, my mother's a really good cook. You'll enjoy it,” Tegoshi assured him without a hint of shame or recognition that he might be bragging.
They began eating and Massu assured Tegoshi that he was right, and it was really good, and then when Tegoshi's mother came down to say that his futon was ready and that she was going to bed, he repeated the compliment.
“Oh, no, not at all,” she said, obviously not who Tegoshi had inherited his sense of modesty from. “But I'm glad you think so. I'll see you two in the morning. Go to bed soon, Yuya, it's almost half past one.”
“I will,” Tegoshi assured her. “Good night.”
Massu said good night too, then took a mouthful of his dinner and chewed with a thoughtful look on his face.
“Your dad's quite late. When’s he getting home?” He commented once he'd swallowed, and Tegoshi froze up for a second.
“Oh, that's...” He shrugged helplessly, staring down at his food with none of the usual enthusiasm he had around Massu. “I don't really... I mean, he doesn't live with us anymore. I don't really know where he is.”
Massu stared at him with his mouth partially open, slowly flushing red with shame.
“I'm sorry. I didn't mean... Well, you know,” he laughed uncomfortably, then cringed again. “I'm sorry, it's not funny, I just...”
Tegoshi smiled gently.
“You're awkward, Massu,” he said, keeping his voice light. “It's okay, seriously. You didn't know.”
Massu didn't say anything, stuffing his mouth so he wouldn't have to think of anything to say, but Tegoshi continued to talk normally, and soon the atmosphere lightened up again.
Dinner together felt very similar to their lunch break excursions; relaxed and easy, with casual conversation and laughter, even despite Massu's little slip-up. Tegoshi caught himself thinking a couple of times that it felt like they were dating or living together, and he had to shake the thoughts from his head. Still, it was hardly an unpleasant idea.
They did the washing up together, bumping elbows as they scrubbed and dried the plates, and Tegoshi had to fight off further thoughts about how it felt like they were a couple.
They got to bed a little before two, Massu going off to sleep in the tatami room on his futon, and Tegoshi to his own room after hanging Massu’s laundry out to dry. He felt a little off as he was changing into his pajamas, but it took him until he was lying in bed with the light out before he realized exactly what was wrong.
Without Massu right here with him to take his mind off things, it was harder to get his mind off thoughts of his father.
Tegoshi didn’t think about him directly anymore, but he was still present in almost every day of his life. Tegoshi was never sure whether to resent him or miss him, whether to feel sad or angry that he was gone. It’d been so sudden, without so much as a goodbye; two and a half years ago, Tegoshi had honestly thought that after Miyagi Pharmaceutics had bought out his father’s smaller failing company and paid off their debts, that their problems were finally over. His father had been offered a stable position working for the corporation, Tegoshi had been able to stay in nursing school and they no longer risked losing the food from their table or the roof from over their heads.
And then one day, his dad’s suitcase and a few of his personal belongings and clothes had just disappeared, and he’d never come back. Tegoshi and his mother had been distraught, couldn’t understand why, just when things were looking up, he’d take off like that.
It hurt, being abandoned. It would be nice to be able to forget, but when he was trapped at the company, unable to blame anyone but his father for it, it was impossible to put him out of his mind. His father’s memory was like a ghost haunting him, which was unnervingly fitting, because Tegoshi was fairly certain that he was dead.
No one had told him directly, but he was doubtless that his father had originally been in the position Tegoshi was in now, working for the business for low wages to pay off the debts they’d covered for him, burdened by the terrible secret that lay in the company basement, beneath floors of steel and concrete.
“You must understand that confidentiality on this topic is of the utmost importance,” they’d told him, on that last day he’d spent as an innocent, wide-eyed nursing student. “You don’t want to end up like your father.”
Tegoshi was a smart boy, had always been a smart boy, and he’d been able to put two and two together. He understood now why his father had disappeared, understood too well, and wished that, like his mother, he could’ve spent the rest of his life wondering instead.
He woke up to Massu’s voice the next morning, softly rousing him from sleep.
“Your mother says to tell you breakfast is nearly ready,” he said, and Tegoshi blinked heavy eyelids, slowly recalling the events of the previous day.
“Okay,” he replied dozily, words thick on his sluggish tongue. “I’m coming.”
Massu was already dressed in his suit, looking at fresh faced as ever. Must be a morning person, Tegoshi thought, a little enviously, watching him leave the room. Tegoshi wasn’t a morning person in even the broadest sense of the word; not until after his first cup of coffee anyway.
He showered and dressed quickly, then went to organize his briefcase and wallet as he usually did. He dug through the piles of things on his desk, a frown slowly spreading across his face as his search turned up fruitless. He couldn't find his wallet anywhere, and he was sure he'd left it on his desk last night.
Tegoshi glanced at his wall clock, wincing at the time. As if on cue, his mother poked her head around the door.
“Yuya? Are you okay? Breakfast's ready.”
Tegoshi flashed her a strained smile.
“Sorry, I’m coming soon. I just can’t find my wallet.”
He ended up sitting through another brief ‘I wish you’d be more cautious with your things’ lecture, before his mother told him to give up and come downstairs.
“You two will miss the bus otherwise, and you can’t make Yoshimoto-kun late. I’ll give you some money for your bus fare and lunch, okay?”
With his regular swipe card hanging around his neck, there were no excuses for Tegoshi to keep looking. He couldn’t tell his mother that he had another card, hidden in his wallet, which he’d get into enormous trouble at work for losing. All he could do now was cling to the groundless hope that maybe he wouldn’t have to go down to the lab today. He knew it was close to impossible that he wouldn’t be required to go down there, since they had infected test subjects a couple of weeks ago who he expected were now ready to receive the trial cure.
He tried to keep up a cheerful appearance during breakfast anyway, and found that it wasn’t so hard with Massu there, smiling and chatting with him and his mother like he’d been coming over all his life.
“Do you have enough money for the bus?” Tegoshi’s mother asked Massu as he and Tegoshi were getting ready to leave, and trying to force 500 yen into his hand when he didn’t seem sure.
“She likes you,” Tegoshi told him once they were out of the house, walking down the pavement. It made the short trip to the bus stop more pleasant, having someone beside him, taking his mind off the day ahead.
“Does she?” Massu sounded pleased. “I’m glad.”
It felt good, sitting together on the bus. It was the closest they’d ever been, Tegoshi realized, squashed up next to each other, shoulders nestled firmly together and thighs touching. Once again, he paid no mind to the brunet law student when he got onto the bus, too focused on Massu and their conversation to notice the young man’s disappointed, envious expression.
Once they’d gotten off the bus and arrived at the doors of the company building, Massu stopped and pulled out his cellphone.
“I have to go now,” he said, before his eyes flicked down to check his messages. “But thank you again for letting me stay last night.”
“Where are you off to?” Tegoshi asked, completely overlooking any ‘you’re welcome’s or ‘it was no trouble’s.
“The other lab. I don’t work here on Thursdays.” Almost as if on cue, his phone went off. “I’ll see you next Wednesday.”
Tegoshi watched him leave, approaching a car that had pulled up to the sidewalk, then climbing in. From where he was standing, Tegoshi could easily make out Ryo in the driver’s seat, feeling a twist of something dark and nasty flare up in his stomach when Ryo reached out to put a hand on Massu’s shoulder. He turned away, heading into the building; jealousy was the last thing he needed right now.
He was met with a stroke of luck when it was time to start work. It didn’t seem like it at the time when Miyagi told him that yes, he was needed in the lab today, and Tegoshi couldn’t bring himself to say that he had no means of getting down there.
He almost fainted with relief when he walked out of the office, almost right into Suzuki-sensei. Tegoshi had never been so happy to see him in his life.
“Good morning, Tegoshi-kun,” he greeted him, and for once, Tegoshi actually responded with real feeling. “I assume Miyagi-san has already told you that we need your assistance.”
Tegoshi nodded, and Suzuki beckoned for him to come along, and Tegoshi followed on legs shaky with relief.
He started coming to work earlier over the next week, making sure he got there at the same time as the scientists so he could catch the elevator down with them, and almost danced for joy when he was told he wouldn’t be needed in the lab for the first half of the next week.
The fact that he still couldn’t find his wallet made him a little less enthusiastic, however. He’d practically turned his room upside down in his search for it, and it was a total mess as a result. He’d planned to tidy it up a bit over the weekend, but that hadn’t come to pass, and there was always the worry that he might be called down to the lab without warning.
His heart sank on Monday when he went into Miyagi’s office and was informed that there was a pile of reports he needed to go and fetch from the laboratory, up until he was told that he could borrow the company car to fetch them.
“Koyama-kun has a high fever today, and can’t come in to work, so I’d appreciate it if you could go and collect them,” Miyagi said, while Tegoshi tried desperately not to let it show on his face how relieved he was.
“Are they expecting me now?” He asked, unable to help the celebratory smile that came over his face when the answer was yes.
> go to part 2