Chapter Text
Name
Himura, Touya
Bio
My boredom comes at a detriment to society
Lives in Musutafu, Japan
Loc: 16 kilometers away
About me
24*
Looking for someone to take to couples therapy and see how long it takes the therapist to notice we don’t know each other.
My interests
Music Cooking Coffee
Now, one could say Keigo has no business swiping right on a man who, at the very best of times, is just on the app to kill some time. One would also be correct in saying that, but let’s rewind for the sake of context. And comedic timing.
Keigo is alone at work — as he oftentimes is. Rumi, his only friend at this place and roommate, is currently out doing her own thing and she’s made it more than clear that she’s not putting up with a second more of his moping. He’s been through thirteen godawful dates in the past two months, he’s hardly to blame for his ever souring mood. Every guy he’s met with in university has been either a complete dolt, or a snob. And, fresh out of college, his dating pool now included complete dolts and snobs who thought they should, entirely unprompted, teach him something about his work. Needless to say, Keigo was frustrated out of his fucking mind.
So, against all better judgement, he goes and downloads a silly looking dating app called Fishes. The logo was a winking fish with the line ‘there’s always more fishes in the sea’. And, damn him, maybe he needed the reminder more desperately than he thought because between the intellectual snobs, the married men, and the guys who made a run for it the second he brought up being trans, he thought there was no way it could get any worse.
When he sees Himura Touya’s ‘About me’ section it gets a snort so ugly out of him that the janitor looks at him some way, making Keigo recline in his seat. My bad. And he instinctually swipes right. At least the guy’s funny, what’s the worst that can happen?
Himura, Touya has accepted your invitation!
You can now access photos, videos, chat, and more!
Keigo briefly ponders about how these apps never define what ‘more’ is in actuality, then decides to take a look at Funny Guy’s profile.
Two things: 1) He’s really hot. Like, I-Kinda-Want-Him-To-Be-A-Little-Mean-To-Me sorts of hot. Hot enough for Keigo to file his smoking habit, which he held a genuine disdain for, to a ‘to be considered later’ file. The fact that he isn’t really looking for a first date, one of many which they could eventually tell people about as part of their backstory after many happy years together was a tragedy of a gravity the world has never before witnessed. And, to his credit, Keigo is aware that he’s not too bad on the eyes himself. Which leads into the second point.
2) Keigo really, truly, with all the power vested in him by churchandthestate.com, wishes his chosen pictures weren’t of him riding on top of Rumi’s shoulders during a post-finals party that might be a real-time Mandela Effect example because nobody knows what happened there, and an overly serious picture of him with reading glasses on like he’s about to audition for the role of Giles, The Librarian. He knew why he chose these pictures when he did. In the first one he was shirtless which not only showed off muscle that he was rather proud of, but top surgery scars, and that saves him a lot of strange and intrusive conversations. The second one was to balance the first one because he was beyond shitfaced when Rumi carried him around, and at age 22, he did not need to be perceived like a drunken college student all the time.
Maybe he overthought this whole dating app thing. But, then again, the first fish to bite (kill him) isn’t even interested so it really doesn’t matter that Himura Touya has dreamy eyes, hair that looks unfairly soft, and great style if his pictures were anything to go by. He would not say that but Touya has scars himself, and this took away some of his apprehension about his own. Sue him, Keigo was a resident of Insecurity Ville and he’d probably win the next mayoral-fucking-race if one more person asks about his personal history in increasingly polite ways that just make him feel worse about wanting to deliver a smooth ‘fuck off’. This way, at least the guy might not ask.
Himura, Touya
Hey
Hey. Keigo could do ‘Hey’. Yeah.
Takami, Keigo
Het
Hez
HEY
Sorry, new phone
He’ll kill himself.
To his credit, Touya didn’t call him a complete moron.
Himura, Touya
Nice glasses
Takami, Keigo
thanks, they make me look
like my shitty dad. woo gender
affirmation!
Why’d he say that?
Again, Touya doesn’t call him a complete moron. What’s up with this guy?
Himura, Touya
Lmao
Himura, Touya
This app’s ugly for texting
here’s my number ██████████
Keigo paused for a second. His number? Like, his personal cell? To a stranger off a dating app? That’s a red flag if he’s ever seen one. However, his shift is over. He gets home, slings his bag across the room to his bed and braces himself for another night of having instant noodles because he can’t cook for shit, and Rumi won’t be home for another few hours. He could try to wait but the churning in his stomach paired with the slight feeling of nausia tells him that he can’t skip dinner after having skipped lunch and having had a banana for breakfast. So he sits alone at the bar, tapping the black screen of his phone as he waits for the water to boil. He’ll have some left over, he should probably make tea and do something about the pit in his stomach. Huh, come to think of it, isn’t Himura Touya interested in cooking? That is one of the things he’s listed. He’ll have to get better at cooking eventually, especially now that he doesn’t have a caffeteria in a dorm anymore because he isn’t living in a dorm. It might be nice to get pointers from somebody who already cooks though. He types in Himura Touya’s number and shoots him a text.
Takami, Keigo
Hey
Nailed it.
Takami, Keigo
it’s me. keigo, from the app
Himura, Touya is calling you . . .
Again, two things: 1) The water started boiling a minute ago. Keigo wasn’t hearing it. 2) He nearly drops his phone in it with the vigor of his fumble.
Who the everloving fuck calls instead of texting? What sort of red-flagged, dating-app-murderer-
Needless to say, Keigo picks up.
“Hey.” Oh fuck you, he thinks, he sounds hot too. To be frank, he sounds like a smoker too but he’s already decided to file that to ‘later-never’.
“You said that already,” Keigo pointed out. There was no malice in it. “Any particular reason you called instead of just texting?”
He doesn’t mean to be rude. It was just so weird. He’s twenty-four, not decaying.
“Wanted to put a voice to the face,” says the dating app murderer, “sorry if that freaked you out.”
Keigo huffed, amused. “A little, man. Pretty sure that’s the first thing Ghostface does to his victims.”
“You know, I usually start looking like a psycho killer after the first date.”
“Is that what you want?” Keigo asks, a bit too fast for his own good. “A date, I mean. I thought you wanted to fuck with some poor couples therapist.”
There’s a pause. If Keigo stops breathing for a second, thinking he put his foot in his mouth as one occasionally does. “You got time for that?” Touya asks after a bit, “I’m down if you are.”
Needless to say, an hour (or two, maybe?) later, Keigo was sat on his bedroom floor, leaning against the bed to grade papers and conversing with Himura Touya whom, he found, he may call just Touya now. The guy was a riot, another thing he found. “So, all of this is to get back at a therapist for fucking over your brother a year ago?!”
“Sounds insane when you put it like that,” says Touya, matter-of-factly. They’ve long swapped the phone call for a video call after some protests. Keigo looked like shit, he didn’t exactly want to be perceived that way. Then Touya send a picture. He looked like shit. Their mutual admission of shittiness made this union possible.
Keigo snorts, circling all the places where a number was put down instead of words. “that’s because it is. Nobody does that.”
“I do that,” he shrugs, “I’m already on a karmic wait-list for other people. Figures I’ll get some in myself.”
“Uh-huh,” Keigo nods slowly, in no way sarcastically (it is), “whatcha cooking?”
While Keigo was busy with his own thing, Touya shuffles along in the kitchen. It was hard not to be at least slightly impressed with his grace and elegance in the room of the house that usually has him scraming at the fire alarm. Putting down ‘cooking’ as an interest seems downright misleading. Keigo was interested in cooking, Touya mastered it. “Honey-orange glazed salmon,” he holds up the pan, as if to add to the churning in Keigo’s stomach, “and some veggies.”
“Some veggies, he says,” Keigo remarks, “are you a chef?”
He smiles in the way that makes the skin around his eyes crinkle a bit, which Keigo files under ‘unbearably cute-later’ in his brain, “sort of. I always have people over so I cook a lot.”
“Do they make it out alive?” Keigo teases, right back to the serial killer thing.
“Against my better judgement,” Touya deadpans, though clearly joking. “But no, I’m not actually a chef. I’m like a handy-man, I guess? I work at a bar most days and fix shit up in the apartments upstairs.”
Keigo tries not to think about how that makes him good at practically everything he isn’t good at. “Sounds fun,” he says instead, “I just got out of uni.”
“Oof, tough transition,” the other remarks. “How’s the vertigo?”
“FUCKING AWFUL!” Keigo responds, entirely too loudly and too quickly. “My brain is still coming down from the differences in sleep, the changes from class-related stress to work-related stress, and oh my god, the October backpain hits-” amidst his rant, Keigo notices himself counting down complains on his fingers, freezes momentarily and attempts a casual save, “how’d you know that?”
Touya doesn’t laugh, not once during their conversation, but he shakes his head as if he just remembered a secret only he’s privy to and exhales something very similar to a laugh, and Keigo thinks that he should aim to hear what the real deal sounds like just once. “There’s a tennant in this building that’s taking a gap year and working the bar downstairs when I can’t, she’s been having random bouts of dizziness every few weeks. The whole bunch of them. I might as well run an ER on the side. Six 19-year-olds who’ve had nothing to eat but instant ramen for the past year,” he sighs, “hence my culinary career.”
“Oh man, that’s tough. Room for one more?” Keigo grins sheepishly.
“Don’t push it, Takami,” he says, with no bite. “You can complain about it to the doc.”
“Huh?”
“The couples therapist,” he reminds. Keigo totally forgot the plot for a moment there. “Figured that we should come up with things that piss us off about each other. My apartment being always overrun by the cast of A Nightmare on Elm Street, for example.”
Oh right. “I’m a bad listener. I talk too much.”
“Seems fine to me,” he counters with furrowed brows. “Somebody tell you that?”
Keigo was happy his front camera was crappy enough to give him plausible deniability for the flush on his cheeks. “I wouldn’t mind the campers at your place either. I’m just offering bad habits to nitpick, doesn’t have to be something you actually mind. And this is our first conversation, Touya.”
Evade and distract — one of Keigo’s specialties. Evading the topic of his insecurities altogether was the easy part. As sweet as it was of Touya to poke holes in the statement, he never stood a chance against the reigning champion of don’t talk about it, don’t think about it. The distraction in using Touya’s first name, a familiarity they were not nearly at yet, was entirely improvised on his part. Given the way Touya stops stirring, he hadn’t expected it either. He recovers just as quickly, “okay, yeah, but being an ass to you, even a pretend-ass, kind of defeats the point of the joke.”
“It’s not that bad,” Keigo argues, like he has something to prove.
“It’s picking at your personality in a way that I’m not comfortable with,” Touya stands his ground, locking eyes with Keigo. Thank whoever that they are alone because never in his 22 years of life has Keigo had to break eye contact over video because he lost an argument. With a stranger, no less. About himself, even worse. “I’ll say you’re stubborn, though.”
“Ha-ha,” he vocalizes dully, “we will have to nitpick something, though. No couples therapist is gonna believe we’re seeking therapy because heartless old me can’t stand you selflessly feeding college students.”
Touya snorts, arms crossed as he leans back on the kitchen counter behind him. Ridiculous, Keigo thinks to himself, now he’s just fucking posing. “You’re right, how dare you want some peace and quiet without six people over your head after work?”
“Stop being reasonable, dude! We’ll run out of reasons our relationship is crumbling,” argues Keigo, hands up in the air dramatically, “we can build on that, though. You said you work a bar, I’m a teacher. Our schedules barely overlap, we have no privacy, what else?”
“We haven’t taken a vacation together in a year?” Touya offers.
“How long have we been dating?” Keigo asks, “I assume it’s a while. No one goes to therapy over a guy they met yesterday. Not together, at least.”
Touya blinks, and Keigo panicks like he’s about to hear a ‘who the fuck were you dating, man?’ coming his way but nothing comes. “Two years good?”
“Sure. So, tell me, where was Touya, age 22?”
If he leans forward a bit, and if the angle of his golden eyes make him more flirty than appropriate between strangers plotting a prank, Touya doesn’t mention it. In fact, he’s too busy looking slightly worried. “Not in a good place, but getting there?” He says as more of a suggestion than statement.
“Touya, I’ll need a bit more than that if I’m your partner of two years,” Keigo insists, “as much as you’re comfortable with. And give me the fun stuff. What’d you like? The embarrassing shit, you know, that only a boyfriend would know.”
That seems to relax him a bit. Hell, as the reigning champion of evading things, he could offer a hand to his new boyfriend. “Okay, this is stupid and I’m a changed man now—”
“Oh, that’s a promising preface—” the grin on Keigo was wicked.
“—and...”
And Keigo’s jaw had not gone up till the end of that story.
Some days later, Keigo and Touya find they are ready for their first session with Dr. Sasaki Mirai. He’d told Rumi that he was meeting a friend and rushed out of the apartment like chased by a mob with pitchforks. His knack for running late and then arriving at the speed of light is something he decided to bring up with Touya later.
Touya is, Keigo finds, not as tall as he expected him to be based on the video but he’s never been huge on tall guys so it works. He’s long accepted that his mind does and will continue to go there because the folder he’s been filing his gay thoughts about Touya in filled up on their second day of knowing each other, and it’s not like he’ll do anything about his attraction so not torturing himself with denial is only reasonable. Meeting in person for the first time isn’t as awkward as he expected it to be. He credits Touya with that; his presence is very grounding.
“Smoking,” Keigo says, as the first thing when he approaches Touya. He’s been waiting for him outside of the office with a cigarette between his fingers.
“Huh? You want one?”
“No, I mean like, I could complain about it,” Keigo clarifies. His eyes are not wandering to the way that stupid cancer stick looks like between his lips, gently sitting on his lower lip as he drags in the smoke. He also does not pay attention to the smile he cracks at that, like a dare.
“If you want me to quit, you can just say,” he points out.
Keigo pauses at that, blinking. “You need to stop being so co-operative. I look like a demanding ass next to you.”
“Do you? I don’t mind.”
He’s just teasing now. Keigo knows that. From the couple calls he’s shared with Touya, he knows the guy likes to toe the line and joke flirtingly more than flirt jokingly. He likes it, too. Plays along more often than not, even. It’s becoming a problem.
“Himura and Takami, proceed to room 23B, please,” the nurse reads out.
Touya gives him a firm nod and they make their way inside.
The room is, strangely, homely. He can’t quite explain it but it feels like they stumbled out of an office building straight into somebody’s living room. There is a pink lava lamp and family pictures staring right at him, and Keigo reclines in his seat ever so slightly, even further away than he and Touya agreed on when they talked about maintaining reasonable distance. He’s not used to spaces that impose themselves as private, even if he knows that this is something that would make most other people more comfortable. Touya looks over to him, as if he noticed something odd, “he’s not in any of these.”
“What?” Whispers Keigo, taken aback, “so he just, what, has random people all over this office?”
“Former patients,” they both look back, only to see Dr. Sasaki has somehow entered the room without either of them hearing a thing. He was a tall man, older than the both of them, with deep eyebags and slim glasses. “Where are my manners, it is a pleasure, Mr. Himura and Mr. Takami.” He shakes their hands firmly, and Touya gives off no impression that he’s there as part of a revenge plot for giving his brother minor professional trauma. “Can I get you anything?”
Touya shakes his head. “Two waters, please,” Keigo says.
“You don’t have to get me one,” Touya says, a slight frown on his face.
That is not part of the plan, Keigo thinks, but he can do improvisation.
“You’ve been smoking, Touya. Your throat is dry.”
He doesn’t respond, simply nodding at the therapist who seems to be watching them from the corner of his eye as he forwards the message to the front desk. If he noticed a thing, and he most certainly had, he makes no mention of it. Instead, he sits down on the sofa that is adjacent to Keigo’s and crosses one leg over the other, reaching for his notepad. “Then, shall we?”
They do not say a thing. “Whose idea was therapy and who was dragged into it?” He tries, an ice-breaker perhaps.
“Mine.” “Mine.”
They both responded simultaneously.
“We both decided it was for the best,” Keigo clarifies, attempting to save the situation.
He hears Touya audibly sigh from his right side, “I’ve been to a shrink before. I was... reluctant to go back. I wanted to do it, though, he didn’t drag me.”
Dr. Sasaki hums, writing something down. “Here is how this will go. You may relax today, we’re not going to go into any issues yet. The process I specialize in has five stages: Alliance-Building, Acknowledgement, Responsibility, Identifying Needs and, finally, Intimacy. We will tackle this step-by-step every other week, and follow the progress you’re making every new session. You will be evaluated as a pair and individually, and these meetings will be scheduled in advance. Hours are flexible and you may cancel anytime. For now, I would just like to hear from you, what do you expect from this?”
Huh, they hadn’t foreseen that. Touya and Keigo spent their entire time building an elaborate story to tell this man, and they will still get to use most of it in ‘later sessions’ but the question seemed banal. What they expect from therapy? Do most people not come to a couples therapist to solve their relationship problems?
The nurse brings their waters. Keigo feels like he’s needed one.
“I want things to be easier, I guess?” Touya offers.
Dr. Sasaki writes again. “And what when they’re easier?”
“I don’t know, fuck, we’ll fight less? I’m tired of it, he’s tired of it. Simple.”
The doctor seems like the use of the word ‘simple’ amuses him a bit, if the glint in his eye was anything to go by, but does not speak anything of it. Instead, he turns to Keigo, who’s been feeling like a toy car was stuck in his throat and he can’t swallow it.
He thinks, and thinks, and thinks.
Eventually, he settles on, “I want to be easier to love.”