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The end of summer is a weird period for Todo.
During the past two years of his teenage life, the arrival of September had brought a modicum of relief to him, strangely enough. Summer had always been synonymous with baseball to him, after all; distancing himself from the former had automatically meant distancing himself from the latter. That’s why the first signs of autumn had been almost welcomed, at that point in his life.
No more reminders of his past failures, at least for a while.
Now that he has reacquainted himself with baseball, though, the departure of summer is a bittersweet thing. He can kiss goodbye to the rush of adrenaline that comes with the Kōshien qualifiers, to the vibrations of a home run traveling up his nerves to his shoulders and the sweat running down his neck, to the shouts and the prayers of the crowd… Until next summer.
He wonders if the others feel the same. Kaname is probably happy he doesn’t have to sweat under his catcher’s gear for a while. Tch. Slacker.
Maybe he should ask Chihaya what he thinks. Every now and then Todo is tempted to find out exactly how he had spent the previous summer, but maybe it’s not his place to ask. Not that Chihaya would answer, anyway. He’s not sure if it’s even possible to get a straight answer out of him when it comes to his private life. God, everything about Chihaya is always strictly private or personal, it kinda pisses him off–
He could still try asking him, though, since they’re walking home together in the dying light of a day already shorter than the previous one, wading through sleepy neighborhood after sleepy neighborhood, until they’ll eventually reach the point where they drift apart. The silence between them has grown comfortable enough for a question.
Experimentally, he glances to his right. Maybe he should have expected it, but Chihaya is already staring back at him out of the corner of his eye.
“Something on your mind, Todo-kun? Don’t tell me you want my opinion about today’s onigiri filling.”
The thing about Chihaya is that he can be awfully perceptive when he wants. Not in the genuine, instinctive way Kaname is attuned to the emotions of others, no. There’s always a clinical sort of edge to it. Todo doesn’t know what to make of it most of the time, but that can be applied to Chihaya’s entire person. So.
“I only accept compliments.”
“Hmm, I liked the fried eggplant, but it was a bit too heavy for my taste. I know you like foods that weigh on the stomach, but I’d rather avoid them.”
“Oh, I can avoid them alright. How about I stop giving you the onigiri I make out of the goodness of my heart altogether, since you hate them so much?”
He knows he’s backed Chihaya into a metaphorical corner when his face goes carefully blank and he reaches up to adjust his glasses.
“Hm? Whaddya say?”
“Look, a cat!” Chihaya exclaims, pointing somewhere behind Todo’s shoulder.
Todo is about to bark at him not to dodge the question, dammit, when he realizes that Chihaya is telling the truth and there’s indeed a calico cat behind him, lazily sprawled atop the enclosure wall of the house on their left.
But that’s not all. That particular cat is actually a familiar face.
Todo turns around completely, only vaguely aware of the spontaneous smile taking shape on his face.
“That’s not just a cat, that’s Kinako!”
Chihaya audibly staggers, and Todo feels a petty flare of vindication.
“D-do you know this cat?”
“‘Course I do. I know all of them around these parts. There’s another female, Mikan, living further down this road, and a fat guy named Sota that I see sometimes near the park close to the kindergarten. They’re not as friendly as Kinako, though.”
He approaches while he speaks, keeping his tone as low and soothing as he can.
“Hello, girl. Long time no see. Are you happy that summer's over? Must have been hard out here in the heat, with all that fur.”
The cat, Kinako, has already noticed him. After a moment of wide-eyed surprise, she lazily blinks at him, giving a trilling meow of recognition and letting out a yawn that ripples through her whole body. She’s grown a bit slimmer that Todo remembers–are the old ladies in the neighborhood feeding her at all?–but her fur still looks soft and shiny.
He crouches down right as she jumps down from the wall and wastes no time coming closer to him with her tail held high, the tip curved in an adorable question mark.
“Ohh, who do we have here? Hello, yes, hi,” he croons as she bumps her furry forehead against the tips of his outstretched fingers. “I’m happy to see you too.”
And he is. It’s really been a while since he last saw her. Since…
“I have to say, Todo-kun, that you’re really fitting a popular yankee trope right now. Did you perhaps rescue this cat from a cardboard box left out in the rain?”
The phrase is followed by the click of a shutter. Todo looks back over his shoulder, only to see Chihaya lowering his phone with a satisfied expression. Like the cat that got the cream, to stay in theme.
“The hell are you talking about? Also, I’m not a yankee.”
“Oh, sorry. Do you prefer I call you chinpira?”
“Not that either. Wait, did you just take a picture of me?”
“For the collection.”
“What colle—oh my god, whatever. Sorry, Kinako, don’t listen to this guy. He may look like a cat, but he doesn’t hold a candle to you.”
Kinako just mrrps and starts purring, angling her head in order to help him get a better reach at the base of her ears.
“You know she can’t understand you, right?”
“Nah, she can. Maybe she doesn’t understand the words, but she gets the intent. Cats are just like that.”
Chihaya doesn’t offer a rebuttal, which is weird for someone that seems to live for the pleasure of getting the last word in. After a couple of seconds, Todo hears him get closer, and the tips of his shoes enter his field of vision. When he looks up, Chihaya is staring at Kinako, who in the meantime has started making biscuits on the asphalt (a cute but ultimately futile effort) with an unreadable expression on his face.
“I thought you were a friend to birds, not cats.”
“What is that supposed to m–oh. Ohhh. I see. What a comedian you are.”
“How do you know this cat anyway?”
Kinako looks at him inquisitively when his hand stills on her back, her green eyes–
(–shining in the dark. A beacon. He’s tiredtiredtired. He ran so much, until his lungs started burning, but it still doesn’t feel enough. He calls out to her and his voice feels like sand, scratching up his throat. He can take five. He can take five and then go back home and hear his sister yell at him and stare back at his bruised face in the bathroom mirror and finally let his eyes slide shut hoping he won’t see any familiar scene–)
“I used to run through this area. Once.”
Chihaya doesn’t comment. Maybe he sensed something, even if Todo tried to keep his answer as neutral as he could. Whatever. As long as he doesn’t pry.
“... You can pet her, if you want. She’s nice, see?”
“I'm good, thank you.”
“Are you allergic?”
“No.”
“Then wh–oh, yeah! I forgot you’re a clean freak. Well, you’re in luck because cats are the same. She may live on the street, but she’s cleaner than me and you both. She probably spends half of the day licking herself.”
“It’s not that.”
Chihaya heaves a sigh, short and almost imperceptible, fainter than Kinako’s purring. The then what is it? gets caught in Todo’s throat as Chihaya crouches down beside him and extends a tentative hand towards Kinako.
“My apartment complex doesn’t allow pets–”
“Mine either.”
“That’s normal. But I was trying to say that I never had pets and I’m not a man of the streets like you–”
“Hey!”
“–so I don’t really know how to do this.”
Kinako realizes a new potential source of pets has entered the fray and cautiously sniffs Chihaya’s fingers… only to flinch back when he pulls back his hand as if burned, in surprise or something else.
“See?”
Chihaya tries another couple of times, with the same result. There’s frustration in the way he bites his lower lip.
“I guess she doesn’t like m–”
“Damn, you’re bad at this,” Todo proclaims, a bit louder than strictly necessary. Before he can think any better of it, his right hand shoots out to grab Chihaya’s left wrist; he holds it still, fine bones and quick pulse and everything.
There’s suddenly a bit of a lump in his throat, and he has to swallow around it so he can say: “you’re supposed to do it like this.”
Slowly, he brings their combined hands up to Kinako’s nose, like an offering. She takes her time sniffing them, her pink nose brushing feather-light against their fingers.
“You have to wait until she’s satisfied,” Todo explains. “Or you’ll spook her.”
Chihaya is holding his breath. He only releases it when Kinako rubs her little head against his knuckles, which is the cat equivalent of the coast is clear.
“There you go,” Todo murmurs, feeling weirdly proud, though he’s not sure of whom.
From there it’s mostly smooth sailing. He guides Chihaya’s hand over Kinako’s back and makes him pat the space above her tail. Next, he nudges his fingers until he crooks them and shows him how to scratch her under her chin. The purring increases in volume.
Chihaya’s hand is smaller and softer than his, but his palm is still littered with callouses from swinging a bat over and over and over. Todo’s pretty sure that, if he lined their palms together, his fingers would dwarf Chihaya’s, but the callouses would line up almost perfectly. He’s trying to picture it, how he could do it, right here, right now, when a small cough tears him out of his reverie.
He realizes that their hands have stopped moving. Also, he may be holding on a little too strongly. Kinako, blissfully unaware, is headbutting their knuckles with an enthusiasm that borders on violence.
“I think I got the gist of it,” Chihaya says, his voice a bit quieter than usual. Todo can’t see his eyes behind his fringe.
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“... Right. Well, now you know what to do. Knock yourself out.”
He lets go of Chihaya’s hand and settles his weight back onto his heels to watch him as he pets Kinako. He’s a natural at it, of course, like with everything else. Except cooking, maybe. That’s one of the few things Todo has on him.
He’s so good, in fact, that at some point Kinako drops onto the ground and rolls on her back, baring her deceptively soft belly.
“It’s a trap,” Todo warns. “Don’t touch it, or you will get scratc–huh?”
“You were saying?” Chihaya singsongs, lightly skirting the back of his hand over Kinako’s abdomen and smirking as she starts cleaning her paws instead of swatting at him.
“How did you–? Whenever I try to pet her there she tries to murder me!”
Chihaya adjusts his glasses and fishes his phone out of his pocket, lining it up to take a shot.
“It’s because you’re just so heavy-handed, Todo-kun. According to cat body language, this is not an invitation to touch, but rather a sign of trust. She’s showing you a vulnerable point, so it’s rather rude to take advantage of it from the get go. You have to be delicate.”
“So you do know how to get along with cats,” Todo accuses, trying to shake the feeling he’s been bested once again and failing.
Chihaya shrugs.
“I only know the theory.”
That’s right, you’re the theory guy, Todo thinks with a hint of amusement, his mind flashing back to their very first catchball session together on the Kotesashi practice field.
“You should thank me for finally getting you some practice, then.”
He doesn't expect anything out of it, maybe the usual mocking remark, so he nearly falls on his ass in shock when Chihaya murmurs “thank you”, before pocketing his phone once again and busying himself with running his hands along Kinako’s spine and rubbing the slightly crooked tip of her left ear between his thumb and forefinger.
“You have it easy, don’t you?” he tells the cat, and there’s a trace of something sweet and weightless in his tone, something that Todo has never heard before from him. “Don’t you ever get bored, lying in the sun? Maybe not. It’s not so boring when you have people like Todo-kun harassing you, right?”
Kinako lets out a single meow and squints up at him, like she’s answering him, and Chihaya laughs, shaking his head and showing his teeth, and the shaved part of his undercut looks as soft as Kinako’s belly and Todo–
Todo’s brain offers him an accursed thought: cute .
No. Nonono.
This is Chihaya we’re talking about. The same guy that never misses an occasion to mock him, the same guy that nags him about dashi broth types and glove maintenance techniques, the same guy that strolls the school corridors with the hems of his pants rolled up as if there’s an ongoing flooding, the same guy that eats his handmade onigiri and sometimes licks a grain of rice off his fingers when he thinks nobody can see him–
Is this also an end-of-summer thing? Isn’t spring supposed to be the time when teenage hormones do their worst?
Pull yourself together, Todo Aoi!
“Todo-kun?”
“Wha–?”
Todo blinks. Chihaya’s rising to his feet again, dusting cat hair off his uniform pants. Kinako’s gone. He catches a glimpse of the black-ringed tip of her tail over the wall where she was perched earlier, and then that vanishes too.
“I think she heard a bird over the wall and she went to check it out. Shall we go?”
“Oh–huh. Sure. Yeah, let’s go.”
And, just like that, they’re back on the road.
Todo is thinking about going for a run after dinner and then taking a very, very cold shower, or maybe three, when Chihaya asks: “why did you say I look like a cat, earlier?”
Oh. This he can answer.
“‘Cause you’re weird like one. A clean freak. You ignore people on purpose. Oh, and you make this weird face sometimes, when you’re being mean for no reason.”
He tries to replicate Chihaya’s strange cat-face, but he must be doing a poor job at it because the only answer he gets is a raised eyebrow.
“Ahem,” Todo coughs, composing himself. “And you always do what you want, I guess. That’s probably the most cat-like thing about you.”
That gets him a thoughtful hum in response, but nothing more.
Silence falls again, after that, but it’s their regular kind of silence. Todo has almost started to feel normal again by the time they get to the point where the road will take them their separate ways.
“See you at school,” Chihaya tells him, already headed his way. He walks a couple steps, then stops. Todo freezes, his hand still raised in a lazy wave.
Chihaya looks back at him over his shoulder. There’s something very Kinako-esque in the way he squints. “I look forward to tomorrow’s onigiri.”
Selfish asshole, Todo thinks, not without fondness, before shouting “I'm going with mentaiko filling tomorrow!” at Chihaya’s retreating back and getting a raised thumb in return.
And with that, he finally turns on his heels and starts heading home as well.
The sun is already sinking below the rooftops and he can already spot his apartment complex in the distance by the time he feels his phone vibrate in his pocket. There’s some new activity in the Kotesashi group chat.
Unsurprisingly, it’s a picture of him booping Kinako on the nose, sent by Chihaya.
It’s a rather flattering picture too. Todo has never been particular about his appearance in pictures, but in this one he looks… Softer, somehow. His face doesn’t look scary, for starters.
He finds himself smiling… At least until he reads the messages accompanying the picture.
Chihaya:
I saw this yankee playing with a stray cat today on the way home. Does anyone know him?
Kei-chan☆:
Oh my god Aoicchi you’re a walking character trope!!
Yama:
Aww, that’s a really cute cat!
Kiyomine:
I’m cuter.
Todo relaxes the death grip on his phone. Takes a deep breath.
“I’m going to make the mentaiko extra spicy tomorrow.”