Chapter Text
Atsumu is running late. Again.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he mutters, rounding a sharp corner—only to nearly barrel into an old man. “Sorry!”
He hears a grumble: Kids these days.
That old man has no idea how lucky he is not to be born in Atsumu’s generation, Atsumu thinks darkly, sprinting across the front yard of his university.
He’s twenty-five years old, working two jobs, picking up the occasional side hustle, and still can’t make ends meet. Despite saving on rent by sharing a cramped apartment with his brother, student loans keep eating every last yen in his pocket.
“Miya,” Fukuda-sensei sighs as he barrels into the lecture hall. “Nice of you to join us.”
Atsumu cringes. “Sorry sensei, I got held up—”
“I’m not interested in your excuses, Miya. You know the rules. If you’re more than fifteen minutes late to my class, you sit the lecture out.”
Fuck. “Sensei, please, I swear—”
“I don’t want to hear it. You’re disturbing my class and students who actually care about being here. Out.”
Atsumu clenches his jaw and sucks in a steadying breath. If he causes a bigger scene, he’ll only give Fukuda-sensei more ammunition—and she’s not above docking his grades for talking back.
He has no choice but to leave the classroom.
Frustration wells in his chest. Sixteen minutes. He was just one minute over. And because of that, he has to sit out a three-hour biochemistry lecture that’s absolutely going to fuck him sideways to catch up on.
He crouches against the wall, knuckling at his eyes to keep the angry tears from spilling. Fucking Fukuda-sensei. Fucking student loans.
All it took to derail his entire day was one argument with a customer who wanted extra whipped cream in his coffee but refused to pay the additional fee.
Atsumu is missing a class worth seven thousand yen over fucking whipped cream.
He bites down on his fist to stop himself from screaming.
He’s already delayed graduation by two years, taking fewer classes just to be able to afford tuition. And now this.
For a solid fifteen minutes, Atsumu just sits there in quiet despair, seriously contemplating dropping out.
He's going to have to quit his job at Mayu’s Coffeeshop and begrudgingly admit the working hours don’t suit his schedule, which will leave him with just his job at the local library.
And that’s not enough.
So it’s back to job hunting. Again.
Osamu is home when Atsumu returns.
“You’re early,” Osamu says without looking up from his laptop.
“I was late,” Atsumu spits out as he kicks his shoes off and throws his bag in the genkan. “Fukuda-sensei refused to let me attend the class because I was a minute too late.”
Osamu looks up, glasses sliding down the bridge of his nose to give him a wide-eyed look. “The fuck? Seriously?”
“Yes, seriously.” Atsumu is still so angry, it’s practically radiating off him in waves. “And the worst part is that I was held up by an asshole who won’t pay a few extra yen for whipped cream and wanted to speak to my manager. As if it’s me deciding the rules! Fucking asshole.”
Osamu winces in sympathy. “As much as I wanna be there for you, I have to submit this paper before midnight and I’m nowhere near done.”
“Ugh,” Atsumu says, grabs a beer from the fridge, and retreats to their bedroom.
You’d think working two jobs would buy him a little more dignity than a shared bunk bed with his brother. But unfortunately, this is all they can afford. Osamu’s health science degree is just as costly as Atsumu’s, and neither of them is willing to give up on their dream of a higher education.
Atsumu pops open his beer with a savage click of his teeth, his dentist’s future concerns be damned.
At this rate—with deadlines nipping at his heels, one too many sleepless nights under his belt and an atrocious diet to boot—he doubts he’ll live to see forty.
His phone buzzes with a text but he ignores it.
If it’s Daishou asking him to cover yet another shift at Mayu’s after partying all night, Atsumu is going to strangle him with his beloved guitar string.
What Atsumu needs—aside from something stronger than beer—is a long, scalding shower and, if the gods are feeling merciful, a coma. Preferably one that lasts the next decade.
But honestly, at this point, he’d settle for two hours of uninterrupted, nightmare-free sleep.
Is that really too much to ask?
He quits his job at Mayu’s the next day.
Daishou cries.
Atsumu walks out with the swagger of a man who’s just taken control of his life. That swagger lasts five minutes and thirty seconds. Then he remembers rent, tuition, and the fact that instant noodles aren’t actually free. By the time he hits the crosswalk, he’s Googling “high-paying jobs no experience no dignity.”
Maybe it’s time to sell feet pics. Dignity is a social construct, and honestly, his arches are kind of elegant.
Still, the crosswalk holds a different kind of promise. He locks eyes with an oncoming Prius and thinks, do it. Maybe he gets lightly maimed. Maybe the driver is a remorseful tech CEO with a guilt complex and a blank check. Maybe Atsumu wakes up in a hospital bed with his tuition paid and a fruit basket the size of Hokkaido.
He wonders if he should just lie down and manifest it.
The Prius comes to a courteous stop, as if personally offended by his fantasy.
Ugh.
Atsumu crosses safely, unfortunately, and glares into the void.
So much for divine intervention via bumper.
The rest of his walk to Fukuda-sensei’s class is spent tempting every car and truck to put him out of his misery, only to be met with offended honks and, in a memorable twist of events, the shrieks of an ambulance that’s regrettably not on its way to pick up his maimed body.
“Miya,” Fukuda-sensei peers at him over the rim of her moon-shaped glasses. “Looks like last week’s punishment worked. A whole ten minutes early. Keep this up and you might even pass this semester.”
Atsumu holds back from snapping something that’ll get him kicked out from the program altogether and finds a seat as far from that evil hag as the classroom allows.
Two seats down, Kuroo directs a pitying look his way.
Whatever.
Atsumu doesn’t need anyone’s pity.
He unlocks his phone, ready to bitch to Osamu for the next ten minutes—only to be greeted by a listing for a live-in maid, courtesy of a forgotten Google search.
If asked, Atsumu wouldn’t even know where to begin explaining why he clicked on it.
Location: Tokyo Penthouse, Minato Ward
Salary: ¥650,000/month + room & board in luxury penthouse
Hours: Full-time, flexible schedule including weekends and holidays
Duties: Comprehensive household management, specialized cleaning, meal prep, guest coordination, and personal assistance to employer
Applicant Requirements:
- Absolute discretion and professionalism required at all times
- Strict adherence to employer’s guidelines and schedules without exception
- Willingness to perform tasks to exacting standards, including use of specialized cleaning agents
- Prior experience with luxury household management preferred
- Must respect boundaries and privacy protocols strictly enforced within the residence
Unbidden, Atsumu’s mouth spits out, “What the fuck?”
Kuroo snorts. Fukuda-sensei shoots him a glare.
He scrolls up again, sure he must’ve hallucinated the salary. But nope—there it is: a whopping six hundred and fifty thousand yen a month.
For context, Atsumu works two part-time jobs, takes four classes instead of the recommended six, and still struggles to cover his ¥185,000 in monthly expenses.
Is it a typo? But would a hotshot CEO really make such an embarrassing mistake?
Worse—if it’s not an error, what horrors await the applicants on the other side of this listing? Atsumu can’t imagine why anyone, even a CEO, would dish out the equivalent of a worker’s biannual salary in a single month.
His thumb hovers over the apply button.
This is ridiculous. Tsumu, ya wanna be a live-in maid for some snotty CEO? The voice in his head sounds suspiciously like Osamu. Then again… didn’t he abandon all traces of dignity earlier today?
Fuck it. Atsumu clicks the button, attaches a PDF of his CV, and hits submit.
Not that it’ll go anywhere. There’s zero chance he’s getting a call back. He’s got no experience managing luxury households—unless scrubbing puke off bar counters counts as “hospitality.”
His résumé? A rolodex of minimum-wage stints: barista, library front desk, pub bartender straight out of high school, youth gym coach, and the occasional handyman gig when someone’s sink made a weird noise.
Fukuda-sensei cuts through his inner monologue by switching on the projector and killing the lights in the lecture hall. “Settle down. It’s imperative that we cover…”
Atsumu hurries to boot up his shitty ten-year-old MacBook Pro. Job applications will have to wait. Either that, or he’ll spend the rest of his degree-less existence working crappy part-time jobs until he dies and donates his useless brain to science.
Later that night, Atsumu squints at his laptop screen like it personally wronged him. The cursor blinks mockingly at the top of a half-finished lab report titled “The Effect of pH on Enzyme Activity.”
It’s due at midnight.
It is, in fact, 11:07 PM.
He’s already rewritten the introduction three times. Nothing sounds right. He tries again.
“Catalase is an enzyme commonly found in living organisms that—”
Delete. Too boring.
“Catalase is that one protein that helps break down hydrogen peroxide so your cells don’t explode—”
Delete. Too honest.
He groans and lets his head fall to the desk with a dull thunk. Somewhere to his left, his coffee’s gone cold. Somewhere to his right, his lab notebook is open to a page stained with what may be soy sauce.
The data table is a mess. His samples were contaminated, his spectrophotometer readings were suspiciously identical, and he’s pretty sure he swapped test tubes halfway through the experiment without noticing.
And yet, he has to write a coherent results section. With graphs.
“Figure 1: Chaos, visualized.”
He wonders if that would fly. Probably not.
The assignment brief keeps taunting him from the tab he keeps refusing to read in full:
Submit a 1000-word report analyzing the impact of pH variation on catalase efficiency, including a detailed discussion of enzyme kinetics, experimental error, and implications in biological systems.
He types:
“This experiment was a goddamn trainwreck.”
Backspace, backspace, backspace.
He’s never hated proteins more in his life.
On and on it goes.
He hits submit at exactly 11:59 PM, crouched in a stuffy corner of their living room smelling like cup-ramen and despair.
Atsumu half-assed it. Quarter-assed it? Completely assed it?
Moral of the story: what he submits is ass. Ass-squared, times five, to the power of 10.
He crashes on the couch soon after, in a hoodie three days past its prime, setting an alarm several hours before his library shift to finally tackle their mountain of laundry—and maybe even take a much-needed shower.
Six hours later, the 6 AM light bursts through their curtainless window, stabbing his eyelids awake.
“Fuck,” Atsumu groans, reaching blindly for his phone only to almost knock their lamp off the coffee table.
6:03 AM. An hour before his alarm is scheduled.
He lets out a mournful cry. Running on five hours of sleep is hell as it is—but pairing it with laundry, a brain-numbing library shift, an organic chem lecture, and more homework? That should be a crime against humanity.
Atsumu rolls off the couch, missing one sock and his reading glasses, with the intention of using up all the hot water in the shower, Osamu’s wrath be damned.
But alas, that’ll have to wait—because right then, Atsumu’s phone starts shrieking with electronic rage.
He dives for it before it could wake Osamu up and put an end to his showerly scheming.
“Hello?” He wheezes out, half bent over the couch.
“Miya Atsumu? This is Mr. Sakusa’s office. He’s expecting you for an interview tomorrow at 9 a.m. sharp.”
There’s a pause.
“Please be punctual.”
Atsumu stares at his reflection on the TV screen. His hair looks like a failed science experiment.
Interview where? Who? What job did I even—oh no.
“Miya-san?”
“I—yes! Yes, ma’am, I’ll be there. 9 AM sharp. Can ya just, uh, send me the office location?”
There’s another pause.
His phone pings with a text notification. “Sent. Make sure to drop your ID off at the security desk on the ground floor. And Miya-san, Sakusa-sama expects all applicants to wear suits.”
Suits.
Suits?
Does Atsumu even own a respectable suit?
“Yes, ma’am,” he says dumbfoundedly.
Suit.
A suit.
Fuck, a suit!? For a live-in maid position!? “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Tsumu, what’re ya muttering about?” Osamu grumbles from the doorway to their bedroom and fuck, there go his dreams of a shower from hell.
They tackle the laundry together.
“How many pairs of fuckin’ socks do ya own?” Atsumu snaps, holding up yet another armful. “Fifty?”
Osamu smacks him upside the head. “At least I don’t own a hundred fuckin’ boxers.”
“Forgive me for wantin’ my ass in clean underwear!”
They manage three quick loads in their mechanical washing machine before Atsumu loses the time war. With only twenty minutes to spare, Atsumu steals the world’s fastest, most disappointing shower and hits the door running.
Tokyo’s Central Library looms into view two blocks down. 10:05 AM.
He takes the stairs three at a time, barreling through the grand front doors and skidding to the desk—and Jesus Christ, there’s already a man waiting five minutes past opening.
Atsumu plasters on his best customer service smile, calves on fire from his impromptu sprint. “Hi there, how can I help you?”
Only a med student would come in this early. Or a psychopath.
Judging by the askew shirt, stony face, and dirty shoes, Atsumu’s betting on the latter.
The man leans in, voice low and deadly serious.
“Where’s your restricted section?”
Atsumu blinks. “Our—our what now?” He squints. “Sir, this isn’t Hogwarts.”
Dead silence.
The man doesn’t even flinch. “I’m looking for books on how to disappear. Like, permanently. Any edition is fine.”
There’s a full beat of silence where Atsumu contemplates calling security. Or HR. Or a priest. Or maybe his mom.
Instead, he smiles tightly. “Right. So. Self-help is aisle four. Next to the tax guides.”
The man disappears behind a row of books like the human embodiment of a late-night Reddit thread that got prematurely restricted.
Definitely a psychopath.
Or at least someone who should be on a government watchlist—if not for the request, then for the appearance: mid-thirties, maybe, hair in a suspiciously DIY cut, trench coat indoors.
He scribbles out a quick SOS on a yellow sticky note and slaps it to the inner edge of the desk:
Trench Coat Guy came in at 10:05 AM. If I disappear, he did it.
Y’know. Just in case he makes the morning news.
Devastatingly Well-Hung Young Man Meets Untimely Demise on Aisle Four.
But hey—at least he’d go out with a bang.
Shaking his head in amusement, he pulls out his laptop and busies himself with finishing off some readings before his Organic Chem lecture at 2 PM.
Haraguchi-sensei might not be a hardass like Fukuda-sensei—who eats missed deadlines for breakfast like some academic Grim Reaper—but he still expects genuine effort.
That’s all well and good… if the assigned readings even made sense.
Two pages in, and Atsumu is ready to end his laptop’s ten-year reign via defenestration.
He allows himself a pause to grab a coffee from the library’s only saving grace: a vending machine. If he’s going to do this without chugging battery acid, he’ll settle for the next best thing—a litre of caffeine, give or take. It all depends on whether he burns off the coffee, or it fries his arteries first.
Atsumu vs Coffee
287 : 0
The odds are in his favour.
He returns to the front desk with some of his optimism restored. His laptop is where he left it, Organic Chemistry: A Short Course open in one tab.
He skims the first two pages again.
That goes about as well as his first try.
He squints, rereading a sentence for the third time and underlines “inversion of configuration” like that’ll magically implant the knowledge in his brain.
He’s trying to focus on a paragraph explaining the stereospecificity of SN2 reactions, but all he’s getting is:
nucleophile go bonk → carbon do flip.
Trench Coat Guy comes briefly into view; still roaming ominously around aisle four, muttering gibberish under his breath. Atsumu is half-sure he's trying to summon the devil.
Discreetly, he adjusts his chair so he’s got a clear line of sight to both the fire alarm and the closest blunt object (a hardcover medical dictionary).
That’ll do. It brains Atsumu via telepathy on a regular basis. He’s sure that, in a fight between Trench Coat Guy and the Medical Dictionary, the Medical Dictionary will lobotomise Trench Coat Guy and come out victorious.
Atsumu is so consumed by his musings that he misses the exact moment Trench Coat Guy returns to the front desk—until a hardcover book thunks against the wood, nearly sending his coffee into his lap.
He jolts upright, bangs his knee on the underside of the desk, and scrambles to catch his falling pen. He’s not sure what he expected when he accepts Trench Coat Guy’s selection—but it sure as hell isn’t Vanishing Acts: Magic and Illusion from Stage to Street.
Trench Coat Guy doesn’t blink once while Atsumu scans it. Actually, Atsumu isn’t sure if the man’s planning a Vegas audition or the most dramatic felony Japan’s seen in a decade.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, he makes a mental note to Google signs your customer might be a sleeper agent during his next break.
The rest of his shift passes quietly. No one can top Trench Coat Guy’s dramatic presence.
On his way to Organic Chem, Atsumu shoots Bokuto Koutarou—his friend from high school—a quick text: hey hey bok-kun! do you happen to have a suit stashed somewhere for a rainy day? i’ll pay in cash!
If not, Sakusa-sama or whatever his name is will just have to deal with Atsumu in casual wear.
Nodding with determination, he pockets his phone and starts running toward uni.
If he takes two shortcuts, he might even have fifteen minutes to crunch down a protein bar.
… Hopefully.
In answer, foot traffic blocks his path in a cosmic fuck you, Miya Atsumu.
Probably not, then.