Chapter Text
Isagi catches Kurona’s low whistle through the earphone speakers even over the swishing of the wind as he hurries down the street. “ Wow, that’s a lot. A lot. ”
Despite the bleak weather and the general depressive cloud that has followed Isagi around like his shadow for weeks, he can’t help but grin. “It’s insane! With that much I’d be able to save up for the apartment and for a trip home before the year is out.”
It’s hard to hear Kurona with the wind swallowing his words, but he can hear his friend and flatmate murmur words of support. “ I’m happy for you, Isagi. It’s a big break. Break. ”
He rounds the corner, contemplating for a second before ducking into a supermarket. “Let’s have curry to celebrate,” he says, adjusting the sentence midway into an indoor voice when the cashier gives him an unamused look. He’s learned to thicken his skin against the stares he gets as an obvious outsider, all the more so when he speaks in Japanese in public, but he hasn’t quite managed to shake off feeling like an alien whenever it happens. He sidesteps into an aisle out of sight of the cashier and sets off towards the fresh produce.
Kurona is cheering for curry on the other end of the line. Isagi smiles. In a foreign country with its foreign mannerisms and language and way of life, he is deeply thankful for Kurona. The two were somewhat thrust together by circumstances, being the only two Japanese guys in their dorms, but he and Kurona clicked almost instantly. Over his one year studying in Germany so far, their little circle of friends has expanded - Isagi had brought Hiori into the fold after meeting him in one of his classes, and Yukimiya had approached them not long after. He and Yukki had not immediately clicked - but overtime, they had settled into a more amiable friendship.
It was Kurona, though, who Isagi leaned on as he navigated the worst of the homesickness. Kurona who watched My Neighbour Totoro with Isagi every time the doubt clouding his decision to move so far away from home would start creeping in and shroud the world in unknown colours and shapes. Kurona who took to playing the movie unprompted whenever he senses Isagi was down. They figured out the public transport systems together, and it was easy to get lost and be able to laugh it off with another person than it would have been alone. They muddled their way through failed recipes until they got to the point they were somewhat decent at cooking, with some help from their mothers and the stash of instant curry cubes his parents had thought absolutely imperative to send with him.
And it was Kurona who introduced him to the job opportunity that could stand to change things considerably for the better.
“It’s a babysitting gig,” he’d told Isagi frankly while he, Isagi and Hiori sat in the campus dining hall, munching on riceballs. Hiori had introduced them to the Asian grocery store he frequented, and Isagi had almost cried seeing the aisles of packaged dried seaweed and curry cubes (he’d lived in fear of the day his supply from home would run out). And then he’d actually cried a little when, the next day after he and Kurona had goofed around making riceballs for the foursome to share, Hiori had pulled out his own lunchbox of neatly made onigiri to split.
He’s thankful for these guys, for the familiarity of home in their voices when they spoke, even with dialects as strong as Hiori’s. Thankful for the warmth and kindness, when, as a foreign presence learning to find a place for himself in Munich, he’d felt so cold and lonely.
“I don’t know much about looking after kids though…” Isagi had said, around chipmunked-cheeks as he munched into his riceball.
Kurona shook his head gently. “You’re already great at looking after people, and from what the previous babysitter was telling me, the kid is a low-maintenance one, and the pay is really good. Good.” Kurona had started working at a daycare centre halfway through the year before. The kids apparently loved his teeth and his side-braid. Isagi could see why - Kurona was kind of instantly loveable. “Just call and speak to the mum.”
Isagi, doubting Kurona’s high praise about his ability to look after people when he’d surely have flatlined astronomically were it not for his flatmate, does call.
And is invited for an interview. Meets the mother, a shockingly beautiful woman who seemed to have walked out of one of the high-fashion billboards Isagi has seen around. Met the child - Anna, a little girl, three years old, such a cherubic little angel with blonde curls and bright blue eyes who’d immediately dragged him away for an incredibly detailed tea party roleplay - and somehow, shockingly, without any credentials and after navigating the entire situation mostly in English and partly in his passable German - he had the job.
Even as he’s inspecting potatoes and carrots, he thinks, he can’t quite believe it. The family is well to do, that much is obvious. Isagi’s only met one of the parents, blonde and blue-eyed just like her daughter, but he knows that they are both working, and probably highly important and successful people, if their house and the way they conduct themselves is anything to go by. Outside of campus, Isagi has not run into many people who are so completely fluent in English, without so much as an accent, and the fact that three-year old Anna is so well-spoken in two languages has Isagi impressed, if not a little intimidated.
Tendrils of self-doubt are flickering at the back of his mind, too familiar now, trying to tell him that he’s going to fuck this up, that this is too good to be true. That the only reason he got the job as easily as he did is because Kurona referred him to the former babysitter, and there’s enough trust both ways there that the Kaisers agreed to give him a shot without too much of a verification process. The insecurity and worry that he is about to let a lot of people down whispers in the fringes of his mind as he weighs his choice in groceries and heads to check out.
Kurona is still on the line with him, and synced to him as always. “ Isagi, ” he says into his ear now, voice crinkling through his earbuds from the poor reception, “ stop overthinking. You’re going to be fine. I wouldn’t have referred you if I didn’t think you would be good at this. ”
Checking out his items and quickly bagging them into the tote bag he’d taken to carrying around as a habit, Isagi tries to keep his voice light as he says, “Yeah. Thanks Kurona. Really. Thank you.”
There’s a version of him in the past who would have leapt into this opportunity with the zeal of doing great, no space in his mind to spin circles around worst-case scenarios before he’s had the chance to act on anything. But his confidence has taken a blow, since even before he’s left home. The sudden disappearance of everything that is familiar, the painstaking process of learning to reacquaint himself with the basics of living like he was no older than little Anna starting to understand the world around her, had only dredged that hollow inside of him deeper. And now, it just howled and echoed with doubt, dread, anxiety, until Isagi was sick of it and sick of himself.
He’s not the only person who’s travelled abroad and had to start a life from scratch. He’s not the only person who’s had his dreams slip through his fingers like sand. He needs to get it together - he has to. Kurona has been a lifesaver, and with his earnings they’ve managed to make do with their humble abode, with its draughty rooms and faulty heating and paper thin walls. With the paycheck from this job, he’d at least be able to free himself of the guilt of relying too much on his friend - they’d be able to split their bills far more evenly, and move out faster. Things will start looking up. They will have to.
After dinner - Isagi is quietly proud to see Kurona so content with a belly-full of curry that he drapes himself over their coffee table in a happy boneless slump - once he’s showered and in bed, he pulls out his laptop.
The blank white screen stares back at him, mocking.
His fingers tap restlessly over the keyboard without pressing down. He doesn’t know what to write. Hasn’t, for the longest time.
Turns out acute stress and a baseline of exhaustion from simply surviving day to day isn’t conducive for creativity. He sighs, a quiet, empty thing. The frustration he would feel at his own inability to work words that had hounded him all the way to Germany has cooled over his time here to something more…defeated. Tired.
God, enough. He closes the laptop and puts it away. He needs to rest if he’s going to give his all at work - maybe the results he’s hoping for will just follow.
Isagi supposes that once you get used to life dealing you consecutive bad hands even a marginal improvement feels like someone’s playing a trick on you. His first couple of days at work go smoother than he could have hoped for. It helps that, although their home is almost forebodingly austere in a way that quietly screams money and luxury, the Kaisers are polite people. They don’t treat him any differently for being Japanese, which isn’t something Isagi faces as much on campus given how many international students there are at this mostly English-taught university, but is something he can’t quite ignore outside of it.
And Anna is a darling. He’s taken with her almost instantly, and by the time she decides that she’s going to call him “Yocchi” because “Yoichi” is too much for her to enunciate, he’s a little bit enamoured. He’d always wanted a little sister (or an older one), and looking after Anna, reading her stories before bedtime, doing her hair, going along with the games she wants to play, coaxing her into finishing her meals, feels every bit the opposite of the grim realities of having a sibling that Hyouma would complain about.
She’s a ball of energy, fusses as much as you would expect from a three year-old, but is surprisingly well-behaved and mature. He finds out that she has a brother around eighteen years older than her, which he suspects explains why she sometimes play-acts at being a serious and sensible adult, what with a family full of them. It’s charming beyond belief, and Hyouma and Meguru both laugh at him when he describes how absolutely smitten he is with her.
“It’s good to see you smile like this,” Meguru tells him, and there’s a quiet relief in the way he says it that makes Isagi’s heart warm till it aches. Then he pouts, because no one can beat Meguru at being a child, “But don’t let her take my spot at being your #1!”
Things are going well. Really well. And so, Isagi isn’t even really alarmed when he mentions the Kaisers while he, Hiori, and Yukimiya are hanging out - Kurona is at work - and Yukimiya does a double-take.
“Kaiser?” he asks, putting down his coffee, his glasses glinting in the bad fluorescent lighting in one of the more remote floors of their library. “As in like, Michael Kaiser’s family?”
“Uh, I’m not… sure?” Isagi admits. “Anna calls her brother Micha, so it might be him… I’ve not met him yet though.”
Seeing Yukimiya contemplate for a second, Isagi asks, “Why? Who’s Michael Kaiser?”
Yukimiya’’s face does something complicated. Even Hiori is intrigued enough to put his Switch down.
“Uh, so he’s one of the students here,” their bespectacled friend nudges his glasses up his nose and makes the act look elegant somehow. “In my department, actually. He’s in fine arts, and something of a prodigy? Like he’s won a ton of competitions and held exhibitions and stuff…”
Isagi nods slowly. With the kind of family the Kaisers are, that seems to line up. He understands well enough that they’re loaded, but also that they’re…tastefully loaded. Though minimalistic, their home is beautiful, elegant in its severity and restraint. If anything, the house seems an extension of what he’s come to know of Alina Kaiser and her husband.
Now that he thinks about it, he wonders if some of the paintings he’s seen around the place are by this Michael Kaiser. He’s not really had the chance to look at them, but he’s noted a lot of blue and gold streaking the cream walls of the home.
“What is it?” Hiori says, nudging Yukimiya from where he’s sitting beside him. “Why are you making that face?”
Yukimiya is making a face, like he’s tasted a sour lemon. It’s the same kind of face he’d made when he and Isagi had started off on the wrong foot, months ago, because of a misunderstanding, and Isagi, not in his proudest moment, had called him a mudboat . “He’s kind of also… conceited as fuck. ”
“Oh wow,” Hiori laughs a little, “that bad?”
“He’s kind of notorious, for his celebrity status yes, but also just…his arrogance? He has an honest to god fanclub, and he - ,” Yukki is steadily getting more heated, while Hiori just looks entertained. Their friend is deceptively sadistic. “He was asked to come in and mentor a bunch of first-years for some portrait workshop and he made a guy cry by calling him a clown and saying that even an understudy could have written a better script than that. And this was about a painting .”
“ What?” Isagi splutters, while Hiori straight up starts laughing. Not at the poor guy reduced to tears, Isagi thinks - or hopes. He seems to find Yukimiya’s rising distress a little funny.
“Yeah,” Yukki grimaces. “If people aren’t idolising him they’re staying the hell away because he treats you like you’re beneath him. He looks obnoxious too, he’s got these huge tattoos of roses and dip-dyed his hair blue, it’s just -” he trails off in frustration.
Hiori, eyes glimmering with amusement, pokes at Yukimiya, “Did he call you a clown too, Yukki? Is this Mudboat 2.0?” Isagi whining in embarrassment only makes Hiori grin harder.
Yukimiya snorts. “Thankfully, I am not even in the same department as him.” Yukimiya is somewhat famous in his own right as one of the standout talents among second years in the Fashion Design faculty. “I share a class with one of his only friends though, so I’ve seen him a couple of times.”
Isagi hums in thought. “The people I work for are very nice,” he muses, having trouble reconciling the sweetheart that is Anna to a pompous buffoon that goes around making people cry with cringey theatre metaphors. “It’s probably not even the same guy.”
It was the same guy.
Isagi had been on the way to Anna’s room with a plate of snacks for her tea party when he’d paused at one of the paintings lining the hall. Visual art was more Hyouma’s thing than his, but it didn’t take a trained eye to recognise beauty, and the flowing watercolour swirling together into a painting of Anna smiling angelically was beautiful. It’s a feat of creativity, at least in Isagi’s novice opinion - rather than the outlines coming together to capture Anna’s cute round face and bright blue eyes, the colours, a medley of pastels that suit the little girl’s temperament, froth around the subject instead of filling it out, Anna’s likeness emerging in the negative space instead. Isagi is both impressed and a little touched - the angelic smile beaming up at him from the portrait is so uncannily like Anna’s that it seems to him that a painting like this must have been made with a lot of love.
He doesn’t realise there’s a smile on his face until a voice violently startles him and he feels it fall away.
Multiple things register in the span of a few milliseconds.
Michael Kaiser - because it is immediately apparent to Isagi’s sudden horror and dismay, that this is Michael Kaiser - is tall. He towers over him even from the distance where he stands, arms crossed. Isagi can see a peek of the blue petals Yukimiya had been talking about - there’s also an inked black crown on the back of one of his hands, with detailing that disappears under the sleeve of his sweater.
“Who,” Michael Kaiser says, in impeccable English, “the fuck are you?”
A vein instantly begins to twitch at Isagi’s temple.
Now, the thing about Isagi is - he’s a nice guy. His parents love to dote on him, polite-bragging to neighbours and relatives about how sweet he is. He’s an instant hit with grandparents and kids, and he carries around treats for stray cats because he can’t not feed them when he stops to pet and play with them. All his friends would probably agree that he’s nice - in fact Meguru would probably argue that he’s too nice.
But so help him lord, does Isagi hate a rude motherfucker. The whole reason the Mudboat Incident happened was because Yukimiya had been sneery at him, assuming things about him as a self-funding student (versus Yukimiya, a scholarship student) that Isagi had… not appreciated . It’s water under the bridge now but…
Straightening himself, Isagi draws himself up to his full height, which sadly isn’t by much.
“Ah, pardon me…I’m the babysitter,” he answers. He is less self-conscious about his English than his German, but he hates the aura of put-togetherness about this Michael Kaiser standing in front of him with his perfectly coiffed gold-tipped-in-blue hair, decked in designer. It makes him feel small, and he hates it.
“Oh,” Kaiser says, pulling down his sunglasses an inch to peer at him critically over them. His eyes - a startling blue, just like his sister’s - are immaculately lined in red. Something about this pisses Isagi off even more - did he let Yukimiya’s distaste for the guy sour him towards someone he’s only speaking to for the first time today? “The one Anna keeps talking about. Yoshi.”
“Yoichi,” Isagi corrects, keeping his tone light and polite. “Isagi Yoichi.”
“Yeah, whatever,” Kaiser has pushed his glasses back on to his face and then “You’re in my way, move.”
Isagi, hand clenching around the edge of the plate, forces himself to breathe.
Keep it cool. Don’t react. This is work. This is work and you have to be professional.
He steps out of the way, clearing a path in front of him.
Without sparing him a second glance, Kaiser strides past.
And Isagi hears him mutter, under his breath in German, “Useless fucking clowns.”
Again - Isagi is a nice guy. He doesn’t yell at people and he doesn’t lose his temper easily. But when he does -
“Better a fool than a spoilt brat,” he hears himself say in German, and does not stop to register the footsteps coming to an abrupt halt behind him as he speeds away in the opposite direction.
“Wow”
“I know,” Isagi is face-down in his pillow - his words barely sound intelligible. The glare of his laptop screen is the only illumination in his room. Isagi had robotically gone through the tea-party motions with Anna, expecting to get hunted down and kicked out any second, and rushed home to barricade himself in the darkness and call his best friend.
“That was kind of dumb.”
Isagi groans. “I know. ” he whines, miserable.
“But well, you’ve always had a short fuse to people ignoring you - remember Rin when he -”
“Meguru, please, I don’t need to relive my worst decisions right now,” he grouches. He feels so queasy he thinks he could throw up - the bitter adrenaline of his encounter with Kaiser had made it impossible for him to stomach any food, even with his sweet-tooth, and what cookies he’d been able to scarf down to appease Anna sit like an uncomfortable weight in the pit of his stomach. It had gotten so bad that Anna had put her tiny little hand on his and commented “ Yocchi sick?”, her small little face pinched in concern.
Heart heavy with the knowledge that this might be the last time he gets to play with Anna - a small part of his repetitive days that he had actually started to look forward to, her joy running over to greet him when he came by the house and her boundless enthusiasm tripping over her words with her limited vocabulary to tell him everything she did in the hours they didn’t see each other - Isagi could only nod and call her mother to excuse himself to go home early. Alina had been working from home that day, and, it seemed, had not yet spoken to her son, because she had also sent him off with a mirroring look of concern as her daughter’s and the advice to let her know if he needed a doctor.
Seriously, how could that guy be related to these two Kaisers?
“And it wasn’t like I was being ignored, he was just so rude that I -” Isagi cut himself off with another groan, rubbing a hand across his face. “No, no. It was still stupid. Like, people deal with rude customers and clients at work all the time. I was at work! I shouldn’t have… ah fuck. Fuck. ”
“ Yocchan, hey…” Meguru’s voice filters through, placating. There’s still a bit of daylight streaking through around the edges of Isagi’s curtains but it’s completely dark at Meguru’s end. He can only see his silhouette just barely lit up by the brightness of his laptop screen. It must be around one in the morning in Japan…he’s got his best friend up past midnight on a school night listening to him whinge about his bad decisions, god he hates himself. “ You know I love that about you right? Like, you’ll never take a punch sitting down and that’s really fucking admirable. Professionalism be damned.”
When Isagi doesn’t say anything, stewing in regret and guilt, Meguru tuts, “Stop that. I know you’re kicking yourself, but did you do anything wrong? The guy was an asshole and you called him out on it. People who let jerks step all over them are losers, even if it makes life a little easier for them. At least you have your self-respect, right?”
“Yeah…I probably won’t be able to get a referral from them…,” finding another job after his continued unlucky streak before Kurona came through, and even just the prospect of telling Kurona that he’d blown it and potentially set back their moving out by another several months made Isagi want to burrow himself into the ground and never come out again.
“ Listen, no one’s called you yet to fire you, so maybe it’s not as bad as you think,” Meguru reasons, “Worst comes to worst, you apologise. Surely the mum knows her own son and from everything else you’ve said, she’s nice and reasonable. And worst come to worst-er, you CAN find another job, Yocchan. Good things take time.”
The next morning is one of Isagi’s packed ones. It’s only when he has the chance to check his phone after two consecutive lectures, tucked away in a corner of the library, that Isagi notices with an uneasy lurch that he has a message from Alina Kaiser.
“Hope you are doing better. Will you be able to come today?”
Sleep-deprived, antsy to the point that he’s been avoiding his friends because they would all be able to tell something is wrong with him, Isagi wants to hurl his phone at the wall because he absolutely cannot tell if this is a normal text or a precursor to him getting fired.
There’s nothing else he can do about it though. He has no choice but to mechanically go through the rest of his day, stop by at the dorms for a quick shower, and make his way towards the Kaisers’.
He’s slotting his key into the front door lock, rehearsing his apology and running every worst-case scenario through his head so fast he can feel his brain overheating - he can always just return to Saitama in shame and become a humble rice farmer, that’s always an option - when the thing just swings open.
And there stands Michael Kaiser.
“There you are, I've been waiting for you,” he sings, and Isagi stares at him, dumbfounded.
The cold disinterest from the day before is gone. Instead, the guy is… grinning at him.
And there’s something about the gleaming blue eyes, intently taking him in as though disassembling him as he stands gawking on the doorstep, the sly slant of that smile…that offensively pretty smile , Isagi thinks in spite of himself, that activates his fight or flight response.
Bending down to his eye level, Kaiser leans right into his personal space. “I’ll call you Yoichi, okay? ~ ”