#anlg

They wait just long enough that the food begins to cool, before his mother remarks that he probably ate as he cooked, and is already full.

Shigeo doesn't comment on the countless times he's witnessed Teru's near insatiable appetite, instead trying to appreciate the food and ignore the queasy feeling in his stomach.

The second evening, however, it's harder to ignore.

It's an elephant in the room, both parents uncomfortable eating a meal prepared for them, with the cook so blatantly present. It feels...wrong, in a way that Shigeo has never experienced. He can't tell if his mother is angry, and he doesn't know if he's never seen this kind of concern written on her face. 

Shigeo excuses himself shortly and climbs the stairs, wondering why he feels so anxious in his own home. 

Teru opens the door when he knocks, a mix of confusion and anxiety that for once clearly mirrors Shigeo's own.

"Is it not good?" he asks. This isn't how Shigeo had envisioned this conversation starting, but he swallows the his own anxiety and pushes forward."It's very good. But...you aren't going to come eat with us?" Now it's Teru's turn to look surprised, so Shigeo hurries to amend. "Only if you want."

"No it's..." Teru never finishes the thought, instead turning back to that smile that Shigeo now knows means nothing good. "I'll be right down, one moment."

Contrary to Shigeo's expectations, however, this does not quell the strange mood that has settled on the household. Teru walks tensely, the act of gathering together the dishes for the extra place at the table coming stilted and robotic. The meal is eaten with stilted conversation punctuated by tense silence. Teru stays the entire time, however, until he's thoroughly washed and dried every dish.

The third evening, Shigeo's mother reclaims her kitchen. Teru doesn't put up as much of a fight as he'd expected, shoulders sagging in defeat as he scurries back to the room they've given him. 

Even with a place set for him, though, Teru never appears. 

Shigeo instead takes the portion set aside for his friend, and brings it up to his room. Normally, his mother was strict on the matter of food in the bedrooms, but she lets this one pass, that new worried look boring holes in his back as he ascends.

This time, when Teru answers the door, he seems flat out shocked to see the food being offered.

"There's no need for that," Teru says, shaking his head, "I was planning on making dinner after you all had finished down there. I don't mind waiting, it gives me time to do some homework."

"Do you not like my parents?" Shigeo asks bluntly after a moment of hesitation.

"Of course I like them!" Teru looks properly scandalized, "They are very kind for letting me stay here.  It's...ah. Apparently more than my own parents will do." He laughs dryly, but there is pain there that he is quick not to dwell on. 

"Have I messed up?" he asks, voice suddenly so soft Shigeo can barely hear it. "Am I being too much of a bother? I can be ah...less obtrusive." When Shigeo doesn't answer immediately, Teru hurries on. "Or perhaps...well, I can't pay rent, that's what got me into this mess in the first place. I thought maybe I could help cover the food, but your mother didn't seem to like that, so perhaps cleaning? I'm quite good at that."

There's a pleading note in Teru's voice, and Shigeo finds that hates it. Hates that circumstances have caused his friend, who always spoke with such confidence, to sound so...lost. Unmoored. Alone. 

There are so many things that Shigeo wants to say right now.

"You bought the food for dinner the past two nights?" And of course he's settled on the most inane one. And yet, it seems to encompass everything wrong with this situation.

"Of course. Ah...I borrowed some spices and whatnot, but if your mother is worried about that I can pay her for those too."

Where does he keep his fucking bandages? He knows he has some, somewhere.

“Mizuki nicked some beer from her parents and Eiji is bringing something too,” Juro is telling him over the phone while Teru tries his best to open the bathroom cabinets using only the heels of his hands. “We’re meeting at Eiji’s place and going wherever later, I guess.”

“Oh, wherever? Sounds riveting,” Teru yawns. Which is not even a big act to be honest. It’s a real yawn and he just has to adjust it a tiny bit to make it sound appropriately condescending.

The phone barely survives the act, dislodged from its place by his jaw, and he distorts his shoulders and neck even more to catch it in time.

“What the hell are you doing over there?” Juro asks predictably, finally reacting to the loud shuffling sounds he must be picking up on his end, as well as the banging of the cabinet doors that repeatedly slip out of Teru’s grasp.

“Getting ready of course, what do you think.”

For a second, Teru considers using his hands to open the rebellious doors after all, but he quickly drops that thought again. The cuts on his left hand are superficial, barely even bleeding anymore by this point, but a lot of glass splinters are stuck near the fingertips and he doesnt want to risk pushing them in even further. Meanwhile his right hand already feels too swollen to even move and is turning blue around the scraped knuckles.

He hopes the fridge survived that punch more unscathed than he himself did. Teru didn’t like the sound it made.

“You can’t call me on a Saturday evening and expect me not to be on the go, idiot,” he continues. “Whatever, thanks for the invite but I’ll be elsewhere. Take pictures though.”

“Dude, you’re always elsewhere lately,” Juro protests, more annoyed than disappointed. “What, found cooler friends?”

That stings for a second, and Teru can’t really tell why.

Except, maybe, the word friend made him think of Shigeo and that’s by far the worst thought for him to have today. His fridge can attest to that.

“You say that as if it would be hard,” he snaps. “At least elsewhere no one is whining at me like a ten year old. Was there anything else or are you going to stop pestering me now?”

“Nice party mood,” Juro drawls. “I don’t care man, do what you want.” He turns away from the phone and just before he hangs up, Teru can hear him addressing someone in the background with a “Nah, told you, nerd is staying in again.”

The phone finally slips out from underneath his ear and tumbles to the ground. It takes all of Teru’s willpower not to kick it away over the tiled floor.

At least now he can use his elbows to open the cabinet and keep it open long enough to actually look at the contents. The success is short lived, because apparently that’s not where he keeps his bandages after all. Teru somehow manages to slam the cabinet shut again and judging from the clattering sounds from inside, it only knocked over about half of his things.

If he really tries, he can actually bend the fingers of his right hand. It hurts like hell, but technically he can use that hand.

He’d declare that more than enough, if it wasn’t for the splinters in his left. There had simply been no time at work to look for a dustpan and brush. It had been the end of his shift already and he’d had a train to catch and he’d been tired and hadn’t been thinking and quickly picking up a whole tray of broken glass with his fingers had seemed like a good idea at the time.

From the kitchen, there is a tired mechanical whir and a small spluttering sound.

It’s probably safe to say that the fridge is not going to be in top form again anytime soon.

Might as well head to the store now to get some band-aids and a few groceries that’ll keep at room temperature.

Instant coffee is disgusting. Teru despises the stuff, but it’s the only coffee they have here and he’s at the point where looking at the prices for the actual coffee beans in an actual supermarket makes him scoff out loud.

He gets two large boxes of instant coffee. Some toast and instant ramen. Lots of instant stuff in general. Not too long ago the contents of his basket would have made him cry. Now it’s mostly just the pain in his hands that’s making his eyes water a bit with every movement, but he’s clenching his jaw and grinding his teeth and bravely ignoring it.

“Do you have tweezers?” He asks the cashier, because his own that he uses for his eyebrows aren’t fine enough to pick tiny glass splinters out of his fingers. Past the two customer he’s ringing up right now, the cashier points towards a small shelf near the front.

“I’m not talking about the movie,” one of the customers currently paying for a six-pack of beer is saying while Teru picks out the finest tweezers he can find and steps up to the counter. “I’m talking about the book! Because yes, there is a book. And guess what, there’s not a single robot uprising happening in there.”

Teru can’t see the young adult’s face past his enormous mop of curly hair, but he seems livid when he slams a hand on the counter and points at the clerk with the other. “The robots are completely and utterly trustworthy! It’s right there in the first law of robotics: Don’t harm human beings. Meaning they are actually literally unable to! And the ‘loophole’ the movie used to get around it - 'humans always hurt themselves so we have to overthrow them to protect them’ ‒ blah blah, bullshit! That’s not a loophole, it’s just a paradox. To protect humans they have to harm humans but they can’t harm humans because they have to protect humans. The supercomputer couldn’t have gotten to any decision there, it simply would’ve shut itself down!”

The clerk really doesn’t look as if he ever asked for any of this. He just stands quietly, holding out a handful of change that continues to be ignored, and watches the guy ramble with an empty expression.

He is freed when the small woman with the sidecut next to the chatty guy grabs both the change and the guy’s collar, says “I apologize for his opinions,” and pulls him with her towards the exit, just at the same moment that Teru shoves his basket on the counter. “Get the Hello Kitty band-aids,” she says over her shoulder, and it takes Teru an embarrassingly long second to realize she’s talking to him. “They hold better and look rad.”

Even through his confusion, Teru manages to quickly recover, grab said band-aids from inside his basket and wave them in her direction. “Way ahead of you,” he says, just barely making it sound sufficiently bored to cover up his surprise at being spoken to in this moment.

“Neato,” she nods at him, right before the doors slide shut behind her.

When Teru steps back outside, two plastic bags dangling from the crook of his arm, she and her opinionated friend are long gone.

His right hand is starting to look very dark around the knuckles. He bends the fingers as far as he can, at this point just to prove to himself that he can, and sucks in air through his teeth at the pain.

It feels as though he wants to be angry. As angry as he was when he stopped thinking entirely and punched that stupid fridge. He can’t even remember what set him off. There has just been that feeling at the back of his throat all day, something that tints every thought a deep, painful color and makes it hard to swallow. Every tiny thing has been pissing him off today and he doesn’t know what to do about it.

He walks home and thinks of how he can’t go out tonight, he has to work tomorrow and he’s way too tired anyways and it’s not even as if he wants to go out.

None of that changes how he’s nonsensically resenting Juro and the others for having fun without him.

Or resenting the empty apartment he’s returning to right now, the one that he hasn’t had the time to clean up properly in days and that is housing a broken fridge now, which is entirely his own fault but he still wants to punch someone else for it.

(Resenting, maybe, the lost thought in his mind that he would like to invite someone over. Not for a party, but just for something calm and easy, something that doesn’t feel quite as ‒ cold ‒ as spending the evening alone in silence and going to sleep early out of exhaustion.)

The keys hurt his fingers when he takes them out of his pocket.

And the first thing that greets him after pushing open the door to the stairwell, in the form of just a small blur rushing down the stairs to the courtyard, is a cat.

Teru stops. Tilts his head back and slowly cracks his neck with a long sigh.

This is not fair. Those cats don’t even belong to anyone in the house. They shouldn’t be here. They don’t have the right to make him feel worried all of a sudden because Shigeo will be upset and Teru is grinding his teeth again because why should he even care, it’s not like Shigeo will be coming over anytime soon!

The door is slowly falling shut behind him and he’s still standing frozen, glaring down the staircase towards the basement and the courtyard entry.

He is, only now, beginning to think that he might need someone else here to help him with removing the splinters. Since his other hand isn’t working perfectly either. So. He should probably actually invite someone.

Maybe he can say that they weren’t fighting in the first place. That it was all just a misunderstanding, that he’s just been busy and that’s why they haven’t been in contact at all since Teru declined meeting for a study session. Shigeo would probably buy that. Nobody would even have to awkwardly apologize that way. They could just. Go back to normal.

Only Teru isn’t sure he could. He tries to imagine having to smile and laugh right now and it actually hurts his face.

Well. Shigeo would probably even come over and help him with his hand if Teru didn’t lie to him about having a fight. If Teru just let him fix his hand and then asked him to leave ‒ Shigeo would. Wouldn’t he.

This train of thought actually doesn’t change anything about the pain in his face. Only it also makes him feel like throwing up. He hasn’t even eaten enough today to actually do that.

It’s not like he’s actually going to call him, who is he kidding, he can’t just call and ask for help when he’s perfectly capable of taking care of everything himself, he’s just ‒

‒ just overreacting.

The phone stays in his pocket.

That he still goes down the stairs to see how many cats there are, maybe figure out where they’re coming from and how to get rid of them, has absolutely nothing to do with Shigeo. Teru scatters instant coffee around the courtyard because he’s heard that coffee grounds are a cat repellent and maybe the instant stuff works too. He bought two boxes, he doesn’t need that much anyway.

The cats are loud at night and he needs to sleep. That’s the only reason he cares.

(It takes way too long to remove the splinters from his hand. His phone buzzes all evening as Juro keeps sending him pictures from their outing. Teru pours rubbing alcohol over his hands, wraps them up in Hello Kitty band-aids and goes to sleep at around two in the morning.