Chapter Text
Rin belatedly realises that perhaps he was a bit of an idiot, for what he was currently doing contradicted his entire life goal and time tables a whole hundred and eighty degrees — to the left. Yes, that was important information. He's seated on a chair in the empty French Stratum cafeteria, right next to a slouching one-ninety centimetres length of a sloth pretending to be a human.
The sounds of gameplay and gunshots echo through the barren wasteland that they called a cafeteria at exactly — Rin looks at his phone, which he had bought with his goals to reassure his panic-prone mother he was alright — five-thirty in the morning.
He had just woken up for his morning yoga and practice, and he's pretty sure the oversized rug of a human beside him has been awake the entire night. He squinted. He wasn't worried; Why would he ever be? But rest was important to athletes, even if the one next to him was a rather oblivious and unmotivated one, and he's pretty sure staring at a screen for nine hours straight isn't healthy for anything.
He was awake this early since PXG wouldn't miss him for a few hours, and he had passed by Loki while walking to the training rooms, meaning the coach knew where he would be.
He just hadn't expected a player from a completely different stratum to be in the canteen of the French Stratum, though.
Also, he reckons the idiot hadn't eaten anything for dinner yesterday, either. Rin walks off.
He sets down the plate of curry he had gotten from the fridge in the kitchens and heated up, he's pretty sure Shidou made the extra dishes in the refrigerators at the insistence of Loki, who knew Rin liked staying up to practice by himself, just in front of a fluffy head of silver hair. Nagi looks up from his screen, and Rin grunts at the lack of clarity in the dull, grey-ish amber tones of his eyes, as if it were a zombie in possession of Nagi’s body, with the real owner trapped behind bars and walls, unable to reach out.
It's pitiful. Rin hates it.
“Eat.” Rin demands, because he doesn't ask, he expects and commands, and yet Nagi does nothing except look bemusedly at the spoon Rin had shoved in his face, blinking slowly.
Rin sighs, and steadies the hand holding the spoon. He adjusts the way he holds it, before scooping up a portion of the rice mount on the plate, and holds it at the overgrown dog. Rin’s mind unhelpfully provides the mental image of a large, white Samoyed, plastered beside Nagi’s face and he has to resist the urge to snort, lest he destroys the fragile silence around them; And his own already fragile mask and reputation.
Nagi opens his mouth, because of course Rin has to do everything for this bastard, and the spoon is shoved into the waiting cavern without any warning. If the guy chokes, it's not Rin's problem.
And, Nagi does choke — because Rin is rougher than he's used to, because Mikage was gentler, soothing; Things that Rin can't put any energy into being after that fateful horror of a night, sitting in the snow, but Nagi chews and chews until Rin has to quite literally order him to swallow, and feed him another spoonful of rice, that Rin forgets himself for a moment.
Rin shovels the next spoonfuls of rice into Nagi's mouth just slightly gentler. This repetitive cycle repeats until Rin is satisfied with how much his companion had eaten.
Rin wonders if Sae had ever done this with the blond insect, for he's seen Isagi do it with Bachira and he's long associated Bachira as being Isagi’s dumb emotional support pet, and he's sure the demon was also considered to be a pet to Sae — he's overthinking things.
Nagi was more of a high maintenance plant, if anything. Rin's seen the guy with the Mikage. Nothing like the carefree, lowkey, easy to manage Bachira or Shidou. Rin finds that he doesn't care much.
He eats the last small portion remaining on the plate to save Ego any extra costs, and begrudgingly — Shidou cooked extremely well, and he wasn't an environmental hater, alright? Nagi had started to slouch again as Rin stood up from his seat, taking the plate as he did so.
“There's your last meal of yesterday and first meal of today, now get to bed, moron.”
He steps towards the kitchen to put the dishes away, he'll wash them later, and returns to see Nagi lying with his head in his arms, on the table; Which one: absolutely disgusting, and two: Rin just told him to sleep. Like he always does. In his own bed, in his actual stratum.
Rin huffs. He's leaving him behind, whoever's here after him can deal with the awkward situation that's sure to happen.
He hopes it wasn't Shidou, at least, he wouldn't wish the yapping of that insect on anyone, not even Isagi. And he detests Isagi, with a burning passion even.
But as he walks past the table occupied by a glorified undead he had no reason to be around, the sleeve of his Blue Lock trademarked pyjama shirt is clutched in a hardy grip he hadn't expected from Nagi. The zombie’s clutch has relented, and a faint flicker of clarity that Rin enjoyed battling against on the field appears in Nagi’s eyes.
The grey is brighter now, and Rin isn't sure if it's his own eyes playing tricks on him or Nagi’s eyes shifting colours live, but the older player seems to be coherent enough to whine as he tugs on Rin's sleeve.
Rin glances back at him, waits for him to get up from the seat he's been occupying for the entire night, and starts walking, his pace too fast, since Nagi has to stop slouching and take bigger steps to keep up. He has a mat to lay down and a routine to start, a needy, high maintenance Samoyed be damned; Or perhaps he was more of a needy, high maintenance plant, instead? That image felt fitting.
Rin pushes open the door to his usual training room, pointing towards the direction of a corner in the room, furthest from where he'd be starting his day. He wasn't unkind, and Nagi clearly needed someone to be with him lest he flounders, so he says, “Sleep, or don't. Just don't bother me.”
He feels like a mother.
Nagi hums, and waddles towards the directed corner. Rin liked this about the older player. Everyone else were busybodies with no relevance to his journey and life — but Nagi was quiet, and he never expected Rin to sugarcoat his words, like every other player had, nor did he expect Rin to talk and elaborate more than he felt willing to.
Nagi took Rin as a whole, and accepted it as if it were the same as the phrase, “The sky is blue.” A factual statement that no one argues over. Feasibly, this was why Rin could find himself relaxing around Nagi, enough that he had let his particular bias towards the horror genre slip once — this resulted in Nagi running to him after practice, when their own respective teams had gone to rest, to ask questions about horror games he had purchased on a whim.
Rin entertained him, despite the topics of their conversations not pertaining to anything football related.
He’s muttering about the new training regimes Loki had sent in the PXG chat, when he feels a pair of eyes staring intently at him as he rests on the mat, and he swivels around to meet face-to-face with Nagi, who's moved closer the past dozen minutes.
“You should seriously go back to your stratum and sleep.” Rin says, because seriously — what's this idiot still doing here? Had he been listening to Rin’s examination of Loki’s schedules this whole time? Weirdo.
Nagi hums softly, pocketing his long forgotten phone, “Okay. See you, Rin.”
Rin watches as Nagi steps out, and presumably back to the English Stratum to fall into bed and snooze, a weird feeling in his chest igniting when he realises that he had helped Nagi regain some of his lost footing. Then he throws his bottle against the wall, because that was an idiotic thought, if anything, and he immediately feels awful because he had been raised better than petty tantrums — but still.
He packs up the mess he had made while using the room, and hurries out of it to make it in time for a quick shower before Shidou and Karasu awoke to take the bathrooms hostage in their attempts to get their usual hairstyles.
During training, Rin’s thoughts veer towards Nagi and the sudden lack of Mikage around the taller player — he knows something happened between the two, God knows Bachira had a large mouth and couldn't shut up even if he died, but Rin had kept tabs on his competition since the start of the programme and Nagi had been one of them for the longest time.
So Rin listened to Bachira’s ramblings everytime the boy barged into his room in the France Stratum, because Lavinho wasn't teaching anything again and Bastard Munchen had too vigorous of a training regime that the idiot bee couldn't steal Isagi away.
Loki was kinder, much to Rin's pity since the team took too much advantage of that, and gave his players necessary time to rest and recover worn muscles. Or to train by themselves the entire day. Rin never complained about these days, so he found himself noting down every little drama that happened while he was oblivious to it all, a Studio Ghibli movie on the TV screen in his room to keep Bachira occupied as the older boy recounted everything he heard from Chigiri and Isagi.
Rin sighs, and Loki notices, because of course he does, and the young coach gestures for Rin to follow him. Rin is being led to the side of the field, and wondering what was going on, when Loki goes, “ Chris had a breakdown in the coach chat earlier this morning.”
Coach chat? They had a chat? Rin blinks, and then he registers the name Chris — the England coach. Nagi’s coach. Rin had a feeling he knows where this is going. Rin frowns.
Loki smiles, as if he also knows what Rin had realised, and shrugs. “ Nagi was missing from his room, apparently. Not in his room, neither was he in the rooms of his two friends on the team. So we agreed to look around our stratums for Chris’s ‘songbird’, whatever that meant, and then I found you sitting next to the missing Nagi. I assume that you helped? Chris has been crying about how Nagi has been more focused in practice today, despite running on too little sleep.”
Was that why Loki kept looking at his phone while telling Shidou to stay away from Rin?
And, more focused? With the amount of sleep Rin's sure Nagi got? Loki answers this question, despite Rin not voicing anything out, “ Apparently, he's been trying out new techniques and training styles the past day. The Mikage on the English team is crying in joy, according to Chris — though I'm not very sure I'm open to trusting that man when it comes to the emotional states of his players.”
Oh. Oh.
Rin gets it now. He hadn't just helped Nagi get back his footing from whatever slump he had been in — he became Isagi-Fucking-Yoichi and gave Nagi another motivation to strive towards. He was a fucking idiot.
He couldn't find it in himself to care much about it though.