Chapter Text
There’s a soft backdrop of ambient music as Euijoo enters the restaurant’s foyer—some cohesive, well thought-out blend of Japanese traditional music and jazz—which isn’t that surprising when Euijoo remembers where exactly he is.
The restaurant’s interior is inviting enough when he steps inside: sleek lines and modern light fixtures, tempered back into something a little more cozy with the muted, warm browns and wooden accents. Euijoo follows a waiter through the space, tables here and there occupied by guests in their best night-out ensembles, and it’s not that the air feels stuffy—Euijoo knows he’s always just been a little bit high-strung. It’s the first time he’s gone out like this in so long, after all, and it’s bizarre enough to recall every little event and decision point that led it to being at a place like this, no less. But with the lockdown restrictions in Tokyo easing up more and more every day, his brother had given him a sizeable enough allowance to tell Euijoo to treat himself to something nice—and so, here he is.
He’s led by the waiter somewhere further inside the restaurant after he hands off his coat, towards a seat at the sushi bar reserved just for him. With restaurants still unable to run at full capacity, it honestly feels like a miracle that Euijoo was even able to get a reservation, not to mention on a Friday night—and it suddenly feels a little bit nerve-wracking as he sits down on the elevated stool at the bar, one seat apart from all the other, much more fancy-looking people enjoying the fancy sushi that they’re probably paying for with their own money because they’re not twenty year-old college students. Either way, Euijoo’s here now, and he’s certainly not opposed to enjoying what looks like very good food and his first actual taste of culture since moving to this foreign country, especially after the first two years having basically been a slap in the face of a literal global pandemic. He’s sure he’ll loosen up one way or another. Eventually.
“Good evening!” A voice chirps, snapping Euijoo out of his trance. He’s met with the sight of one of the chefs when he looks up, dressed in all-black and sporting a kind smile, knives in both his hands maneuvered expertly between his fingers. “Is it your first time here?”
Euijoo smiles naturally as he’s asked the question, words slipping out with ease now that the chef had set the atmosphere for them both. “Yes, it is.”
“Well, you can trust me.” The chef starts grabbing small plates from below the counter, nodding reassuringly at Euijoo in front of him. “Can I ask for your name?”
“It’s Euijoo,” he says, syllable by syllable to enunciate each sound, suddenly feeling bashful when the chef tilts his head curiously.
“Euijoo?” He repeats perfectly—and he almost makes Euijoo double-take when he switches the language up, Euijoo’s mother tongue sounding so foreign all of a sudden, “Your Japanese is good, Euijoo-ssi.”
“Oh—? I— Wow, your Korean’s good, too!” Euijoo replies excitedly, in Japanese, eyes wide. The chef’s eyes seem to sparkle at that just as much. “I’ll trust your skills tonight, um…”
“It’s Koga,” the chef replies confidently, nodding his head. “Just call me K, please.”
“Alright… K. ” Euijoo says boldly, surprising even himself when he adds, “K-hyung?”
“Sure.” K chuckles at the utterance, but he nods his head in approval without much thought. “Euijoo-yah.”
Euijoo’s pretty sure that he’s blushing after K says it, but thankfully, neither of them lets it linger after the fact.
“So,” K resumes naturally, switching back to Japanese, moving a little more behind the counter now to actually get started on preparing some food. “Is it just your first time at the restaurant, or your first time going to an omakase at all?”
“I’ve never tried omakase, no,” Euijoo answers, switching back just as easily, trying to look over the counter as K brings some kind of fish out of nowhere, setting it down to cut. Shyly, he asks, “Does it show?”
“That you’re nervous?” K seems to tease, though he waves it off when Euijoo’s eyes widen just the slightest bit. “Just eat comfortably, hm? You’re supposed to let me do all the work, anyway.”
And shortly after—true to his words—K is setting a plate of sashimi down in front of him. Two slices, perfectly cut, with soy sauce and ginger on the side, and Euijoo honestly doesn’t know how that happened so fast.
“Maybe I’m a little intimidated,” Euijoo admits with a shy chuckle, a perfect reflection of the timid and yet awestruck way that he picks up his chopsticks to start eating what K had just set down in front of him. “It’s kind of my first time going out like this after lockdowns were lifted, too, so… Maybe I’ve kind of forgotten how to act in public, I don’t know.”
K only answers with a hum, looking at him with interest. Euijoo’s kind of glad when he looks around that he ended up with K cooking for him, instead of any of the other chefs behind the counter who are definitely much older, and definitely make K look incredibly harmless by comparison. It helps Euijoo feel a little less out of place, at least—a little more comfortable in this place that’s definitely too expensive for someone like himself. Even the clothes he’s wearing aren’t his own, the olive green button-down stolen from Nicholas’ closet after his best friend had told him he wasn’t supposed to show up to an omakase in a graphic tee, but Euijoo supposes right now that it’s not all that bad.
“It’s fresh tuna sashimi,” K announces, right as Euijoo takes the first piece of fish off the plate with his chopsticks. “Tell me how you like it.”
Euijoo nods obediently, dipping the raw fish into the little dish of sauce on the side before putting it in his mouth, head tilting slightly as he takes in the taste and the texture and the everything of it all.
And call him dramatic, sure—but the moment the flavor hits his senses, Euijoo remembers why he even wanted to come here in the first place.
“Wow.” Euijoo says, still chewing some of the fish. “Wow, that’s really good. How is that that good?”
“Compliments to the chef,” K answers boldly, giving Euijoo this stupid, dramatic bow. It’s entirely dumb, Euijoo thinks to himself. (And yet he laughs anyway.) “Glad to hear that, Euijoo. I’ll get started on the next one, then.”
“Have you been doing this for a long time?” Euijoo asks before he can stop himself, taking the second piece of fish while K has his back turned. He only attempts to correct himself when he sneaks some glances at the people beside him, most of them silent and focusing on the food and ambiance. “Sorry, you don’t have to answer that. I should let you focus.”
K turns back around, another plate in his hand.
“You should keep talking,” K answers, switching back to Korean for some reason, and Euijoo swears he’s going to get whiplash every time it happens from now on. “I’m pretty good at Korean anyway, if you’re worried about everyone else hearing.”
“It’s not that,” Euijoo waves it off, watching with interest as K takes the previous plate and sets down a new one, squeezing some kind of small, green citrus fruit on top of two more slices of raw fish. “Where did you learn to, anyway?”
“Foreign language elective in college, but I picked it up surprisingly easily even after,” K shrugs it off, like it’s just some inconsequential thing. “Fresh salmon sashimi with calamansi and light soy sauce. Enjoy.”
Euijoo has to stare at him for a few seconds, blinking a couple of times in disbelief before shaking his head, and only then does he take the next bite.
It’s good, as expected, the fish having that same melt-in-your-mouth texture and pairing nicely with citrus and salt. Euijoo doesn’t say a word in between bites this time in an effort to let K focus on his job, the chef’s back turned once again, likely to fix up another course for him to eat.
But it’s K who speaks up when he turns around again, a new dish already in his hand after literally one minute, setting it down expertly in front of Euijoo the moment the salmon sashimi’s gone.
“Sea urchin,” K says, in Korean, and Euijoo’s first thought is how fluent must this guy be to know the Korean word for sea urchin—but he’s snapped away from that train of thought when K turns the question on him this time, “So are you going to tell me how you’re so good at Japanese?”
Euijoo doesn’t know if he should focus on the sea urchin meat in the tiny bowl below him or on this enigma of a person in front of him, so he just tries his hand at both. “I study here,” he says, before slurping down the meat in the bowl.
K takes the dish from him the moment it’s cleared, though he seems to pause for a while with all the cooking to ask, “You’re in university?”
“Yes,” Euijoo nods.
“Oh.” K seems a little taken aback by that, and Euijoo starts to wonder if he said something wrong.
“Yeah, I’m in my second year…”
“Oh, okay,” K answers simply, before switching gears back into chef mode all in two seconds. “Did you like the sea urchin?”
“Yeah, it tasted really fresh,” Euijoo answers, puzzled, wondering if it would be safe to backtrack— “Why the big reaction?”
“What?”
“Me? Being in university?”
“Oh, uh,” K stutters, and it’s definitely the first time that Euijoo’s seen him nervous tonight. “I don’t know. I was just a little shocked, I guess.”
“Okay,” Euijoo concedes politely. Though he’s not exactly satisfied with the answer, he decides it’s not really worth pushing. “Well, yeah.”
“So what brings you to a place like this, all by yourself?” K picks the conversation back up, a cutting board now in front of him with some seaweed and a plethora of other ingredients on the side. “Do you really just have expensive taste, Euijoo-yah?”
Euijoo laughs, appreciating the attempt at lightening the atmosphere again. A little more comfortably, he answers, “I’m in Cultural Studies, so I just like experiencing all these things, I guess? My brother’s a chef, he sent me some money to go somewhere nice, so I thought I should go and get some good Japanese food, that’s all.”
“Oh, really?” K looks up at him, fascinated. “Do you live here with your family?”
“Oh! Um… no, they’re back home,” Euijoo answers, leaning a little bit more over the counter to see what K’s doing that’s taking him a little longer than the previous dishes, words falling naturally out of his mouth as he tells his story. “I got to come to Japan for this cultural exchange program thing back in high school, since I was already learning the language. I enjoyed it a lot, so I applied for some universities here, and—well, I’m here, so. You know.”
“Rainbow temaki,” K smiles as he sets down the next dish, picking the conversation up easily from there. “It’s great that your family supported you with that, too. Like, you came here alone?”
“Yeah, I mean, my mom’s really supportive,” Euijoo says, smiling fondly at the thought of his family back home. “It did kinda suck, though. I got here, and then everything went on lockdown, like, a few weeks later.”
K’s jaw drops at the revelation, Euijoo laughing it off easily enough after how many times he’s had to tell the unfortunate anecdote. Euijoo just takes the temaki and rolls it up before taking the bite, waiting eagerly for what the other man would say next. “You must be homesick, no?”
Euijoo nods, shrugging shortly after. “Yeah, but it got easier. I don’t live alone, at least?”
“Oh?” K looks at him curiously, though he promptly gets back to preparing another piece of fish. The way that K’s eyes dart around the counter isn’t lost on Euijoo, but he doesn’t dwell on it for now.
“I share a dorm room with my best friend,” Euijoo tells him, finishing off the rest of the sushi wrap. “We met at that exchange thing back in high school, applied to universities here together. I’m pretty sure it’s one of the reasons my mom was so comfortable letting me come here alone in the first place.”
“Oh, that’s good,” K nods. He takes the plate from in front of Euijoo, preparing what looks to be some kind of roll, this time. “I’m sure you’re meeting people on campus now, too, right?”
“A few, yeah,” Euijoo juts out his lips, recalling the experience of the first weeks of being able to actually go to university outside of a laptop screen. He’s not exactly made that many friends as much as shallow acquaintances, and he’s not sure that would be something impressive to share with K. (Why does he feel like he has to impress this guy anyway?) “This is kind of embarrassing, actually, but in the early days of the lockdown, Nicholas and I made friends with a bunch of kids playing online games, and now I can’t escape them even if I tried.”
K raises an eyebrow. “Nicholas?”
“Oh, my roommate. Slash best friend. That guy I mentioned earlier,” Euijoo explains sheepishly. “This is his shirt, actually.”
Now, why in hell would Euijoo say that?
“Oh, are you two…”
“No!” Euijoo’s eyes widen, hands help up in front of him, frantic. “I’m just— I told you, it’s not like I have expensive taste. I was gonna show up here in a white shirt and he was like dude, you can’t just— Shut up, Euijoo. Shut up. K-hyung, can you please just give me the next thing?”
K is just standing in front of him with the prepared roll on a wooden board, hands on his hips and clearly trying to hold back a laugh at Euijoo’s scattered rambling. Euijoo just blushes—and he’s pretty sure much more furiously than earlier in the evening—and it certainly doesn’t help when K springs into action on command, seemingly successful in his pursuit of holding back his laughter in favor of saying, entirely nonchalant, “You’re very charming, Euijoo.”
Euijoo has known this guy for all of twenty-five minutes, but he’s convinced he might die at his hand.
“Are you going to tell me what this is?” Euijoo answers back, a little petulant and yet somehow still polite—switched to Japanese. It’s a little satisfying this time to catch K off-guard, much like Euijoo had been earlier.
“Philadelphia roll,” K recovers easily, presenting his creation with his characteristic, dramatic flair. “Smoked salmon, cream cheese, cucumber, rolled with seaweed and steamed rice. I think you’ll like it.”
Euijoo nods in thanks, picking up his chopsticks yet again. It does sound like something he would like. K just stands there, seemingly awaiting his reaction, not in any rush since he’d given Euijoo a bigger portion this time, four pieces all perfectly lined-up.
K watches him intently as expected, and Euijoo nods in approval the moment he takes the first bite. K bows with pride, again, in that same, stupid way—and Euijoo can’t help but laugh. A vague thought crosses his mind and he wonders if he looks like an infatuated teenager batting his eyelashes right now—but he convinces himself easily enough that it’s just the concept of actually interacting with another human being besides Nicholas that’s getting a little bit to his head.
“Do you like to take risks, Euijoo?”
Euijoo raises his head a little too quickly at that question, blood thrumming under his skin in a mix of anticipation and thrill and nerves. “Depends why you’re asking, hyung.”
“It’s for the next dish, of course,” K says, a challenging look in his eyes.
“Very intrigued, mostly afraid,” Euijoo admits, suddenly finding himself chewing much slower on the third piece of philadelphia roll. “I don’t think my friends would necessarily call me a daredevil, or anything like that.”
“Really? You don’t bungee jump, or stuff like that?”
“Well, I’ve never tried it,” Euijoo answers, wary. “Why? Do you?”
“No,” K chuckles. “Don’t look so worried. No one’s going to make you jump out of a plane.”
Eujioo rolls his eyes. “So what do you like to do?”
“Me?” K tilts his head, seeming genuinely surprised at the inquiry. “Well… um. I dance, sometimes. Or do marathons.”
“Oh, cool!” Euijoo answers with interest, still trying somehow to stall for time with the last roll in front of him. “I’ve been wanting to learn to dance.”
“I could recommend you the studio I used to go to,” K smiles. “Later. Maybe you could go when more things open back up again.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Since you dodged the original question, I’m gonna serve this to you anyway, okay?” K simply says after that, catching Euijoo off guard. He’s only in the middle of chewing the last piece of Philadelphia roll when K takes the board away, replacing it with a plate that’s a little too big for the… thing that’s in the center of it. “Do you know what this is?”
Euijoo looks at K with a blank stare, as if to express his inner sentiments of do you seriously think—? “No?”
“Fugu,” K says, matter-of-factly, and he probably catches the way Euijoo’s expression falters before he continues, “Judging by the look on your face, you’ve heard of it before—”
“I’d like to believe you like me enough to not poison me tonight, K-hyung.”
“I do!” K exclaims, all too quickly, moving right along before any of them could even think. (Euijoo would only be able to really think about it later on when he gets home, very much not-dead from the mildly poisonous blowfish that K had put in front of him.) “Also, I’m legally required to tell you that we do have a license to serve this, and that it was prepared by a professional who has a license to prepare it, and all I did was take it out of a package and put it on a plate for you. It’s totally safe, just feels a little tingly to eat.”
Euijoo just stares at K, wide-eyed, and then he stares down at the thing, and then up at K again. The chef in front of him looks all too eager, waiting for Euijoo’s next move in thrilled anticipation, and Euijoo thinks that if they had known each other a little longer than just tonight, he would have easily told K to get lost already, and that he could feed Euijoo a poisonous blowfish when he was literally dead.
But that wasn’t the case, and Euijoo is extremely polite, and he doesn’t realistically think that K would actually try to poison him, openly, at his highly-renowned, licensed, professional place of work.
Euijoo lets out a sigh of defeat, picking up the new set of chopsticks that K had laid out for him beside the plate, trying to keep even a wobbly semblance of a smile on his face. “Fine.”
“We can keep talking if it’ll help distract you,” K says pacifyingly, seeming to take pity on Euijoo after the fact that he was being so nice after all, somehow still open to the new experience regardless of his doubts. “Or you can refuse, still, you don’t have to—”
Euijoo decides to make him shut up by taking the piece of fish on his plate and putting it in his mouth, entirely consumed by the knowledge that this is technically a delicacy, after all, and though Euijoo isn’t the socratic ideal of a risk-taker, he’s never been one to turn down a new experience.
“Ask me something, then,” Euijoo demands the moment the tingling feeling hits his tongue, head tilted as he tries to reconcile the fugu’s strange taste.
K seems to still be in shock, taking a few seconds to realize what Euijoo had even meant, but he remembers soon enough, moving closer to the counter again.
“Okay, hmm…” K ponders, shaking a stray hair out of his eyes. For some reason, it makes Euijoo laugh, “Okay, since you’re apparently not skydiving all the time, what do you like to do?”
Euijoo shakes his head amusedly, still chewing as he thinks of his answer. “Um… I like to read. Books, poems… um.”
“You doing okay?” K asks, mildly concerned.
“Yes,” Euijoo answers, picking up the glass of water beside him for the first time since the meal even started. “Yes. I like art, too. Not, like, drawing—I like museums and stuff. Oh! Nicholas is a Fine Arts major, actually, and he started doing these art shows as projects for some of his classes since we got to go back to campus—it’s, like, he does these huge paintings on huge canvases in the gallery hall, and people can just pass by and watch him. He uses these big brushes and stuff, and it’s really fascinating to watch.”
“I’ll have to see that, sometime,” K replies, genuinely intrigued, leaning forward a little on the counter. “I haven’t really gone to art museums a lot, and you make it sound so…”
“...So?”
“How do I explain this?” K chuckles shyly, tilting his head in thought. “I don’t know. You just have a way of talking about things—I can tell that you love it. Art and literature and all that stuff.”
“Ah,” Euijoo nods, taking another sip of his water now that he’s fully swallowed the fish and can feel the tingle in the back of his throat. It’s mildly uncomfortable, but bearable enough to maintain an acceptable amount of composure. “I’m pretty sure you’re the first person who’s told me that, so I’ll take it as a compliment.”
“It was a compliment!” K says defensively, taking away the empty plate in the same breath.
“Then thank you,” Euijoo concedes, even bowing his head slightly as he says it. “But I’m sure you could talk like that about sushi, too, if you tried.”
“Well, maybe with this one,” K transitions, chuckling amusedly. “Are you good to move on?”
“Honestly, I don’t really eat a lot most of the time,” Euijoo confesses, “But I’ll make an exception tonight, so, sure.”
“Great,” K beams, his smile a mix of mischief and joy and sincerity, somehow all at once. “Let me prepare the next one, then.”
And so it goes, pretty much the same for the rest of the night. K doesn’t attempt to serve Euijoo anymore poisonous delicacies, but they keep talking nonetheless. People at the regular tables come and go as K prepares and serves portion after bite-sized portion, going off of the little comments Euijoo makes here and there about the tastes he likes and the tastes that are a little more… new to him, going off of what little bits and pieces he’s picked up from when he used to be forced to watch cooking shows with his older brother back home. K asks him about that too, when Euijoo mentions it, and so Euijoo talks about his family, three older brothers and their mom in a modest apartment back in Seoul. K finds it cute that Euijoo’s the youngest, and Euijoo rolls his eyes while he tries not to blush. Euijoo’s served everything from tamago sushi to scallop nigiri to something without a real name that K said he’d prepared to resemble cheese kimbap, a taste of home. And so Euijoo tells him about his friends and the home he’d built for himself right here, and how having to remind Taki and Harua not to curse so much while playing Call of Duty has forced him to experience what it’s like being an older brother instead of a pampered maknae.
And it’s nice. It’s comfortable, and K doesn’t miss a beat. Every sparkle of Euijoo’s eyes is met with interest and enthusiastic interjections, and at some points Euijoo doesn’t even really catch the names of the dishes K puts in front of him. K doesn’t offer much of his own stories but Euijoo doesn’t expect him to—the conversation was never exactly on the menu, after all—but none of it feels forced. Euijoo isn’t even normally that talkative, but there’s something about the atmosphere that K creates that lets the stories flow so naturally, the on-the-fly code-switching morphing into something so familiar it’s unnoticeable over time.
Euijoo can admit he’s always been a hopeless romantic—but even then, he’s never been charmed quite so easily.
It must be something in the air. Or in the poisonous blowfish.
“Are you alright there, Euijoo-yah?”
The trance is broken by that now-familiar voice, and Euijoo has this briefly terrifying thought—maybe it’s just him.
It’s only on the subway ride home that something possesses Euijoo to actually think about everything that happened tonight, and a slew of realizations dawns upon him in waves, while the automated train voice calls out every stop before his.
“Last course is moonfish, Euijoo.”
Euijoo recalls the way K had said it, and the way Euijoo had smiled to himself with a tilt of his head.
“Something funny?”
“No,” Euijoo says, shaking his head at the sheer comicality of his thoughts. “It’s just, my dad was a pisces, and he died on a full moon. Moonfish is just a little on the nose.”
“And you find that funny?” K asks in disbelief, trying to keep the atmosphere light.
Euijoo doesn’t even talk about his dad all that often. He must have been getting delirious when he continued with—
“Well, I don’t really know much about him. He died when I was 2.”
Well. God bless K for not letting that little tidbit of melancholy thicken the air too much, even with the slab of giant moonfish in front of him that he’d cut right in front of Euijoo for him to eat. All he’d done was nod in understanding, riding the wave of their conversation the same way he’d done the entire night.
“It doesn’t seem to bother you too much. That’s good.”
“Yeah,” Euijoo says, more surprised than anything. He’s never really had anyone respond in that way before—and it makes it a whole lot easier, somehow. “My family says that I’m the most like him, out of all of us, though.”
K laughs. “Is that a good thing?”
Euijoo just shrugs, laughing along. “I guess? Again, I wouldn’t know.”
“Right. Well,” K bobs his head, lips jutted out in a pout in thought. “I’d say you’re more of a sun-like person. It’s not in season, though.”
“What?”
“Sunfish,” K clarifies, the look on his face too serious to still just be teasing. “You’ll have to come back again, sometime.”
Euijoo’s brain had no less than short-circuited when those words left K’s stupidly plump lips, and it’s only now on the way home that it sinks in that K had basically compared Euijoo to the sun, and that it’s way too soon for Euijoo to be thinking the words stupidly plump lips.
The train voice calls out Euijoo’s stop, and he walks to his building under the faint light of the waxing crescent moon.
(Euijoo’s in too much of a crisis to recall if K did or didn’t invite him to send him a text soon—but that’ll have to be a problem for another day.)