Work Text:
My (20M) adopted brother keeps getting into fights with a (21M) customer at Big Beef Bowl House
ThrowRA_bigbeefbowlhouse ○ 10 hours ago ○ relationship_advice
I know this sounds really weird, but here it is:
I’ve known my adopted brother for about three years. We met when he came to live with my guardian after getting kicked out by his parents because he was charged for assault (he was framed don’t worry). I was a hermit at the time so we didn’t get to talk until a few months after he first arrived, but it turned out he was cool, we hit it off, history. We spend a lot of time together, but recently he’s been doing a lot of part-time jobs while he’s at university to get some extra income.
The income thing is relevant because one source of this is working at Big Beef Bowl House in the evenings on weekends. Not to do a brother brag, but man, he, like, carries that house on his back on the weekends, having to take orders, cook, clean, etc all by himself. He gets paid big bucks for it, but it sounds so stressful to do every weekend. He rarely makes mistakes, but sometimes he does because, lol, human amirite? This is important bc:
So, my brother’s incredibly nice and kinda quiet, but he’s such an asshole too. In that, like, he finds a thing to annoy you about, but in a funny trolly way. Well, I find it funny. Anyway, he’s emotionally tuned in to everyone and rarely goes out of his way to upset someone. He’s not a dick , he tries really hard to make everyone happy and tends to defuse tense situations before they escalate. Except at Big Beef Bowl House.
Every weekend during my brother’s shift, this certain customer always visits. They know each other by name which initially sounds cute but oh my god no. One time when I was there (not eating beef bowl bc my stomach is not an empty black hole), my brother and this customer started chirping at each other, like, little snipes and teasing. Initially I was like ‘oh, they’re probably friends or something’, but whenever my brother served up the customer’s food, there was always something wrong with it and would ask him to remake it. And, like, my bro’s got thick skin, but after the end of that shift and we were walking home, he was kinda in a bad mood. We didn’t talk about it though because I was just like, one bad customer experience, right? He’ll forget about it by next week.
WRONG.
The customer is there again, and I suggested that my bro, like, requests diff shift times or something, but he was all ‘no, I refuse to lose’ (???). So bro goes about his shift, I’m sitting there feeling like I’m waiting for two cats to start scrapping, and again the customer, like, hates my bro’s food. The order gets remade twice, and then my bro finally loses his temper and just serves him a piece of toast with a hole cut out in the middle of it with a fried egg in it (idk) and the customer got really mad and threw the egg toast at my bro, which made my bro come around from behind the bar to throw it back at him. They ended up sort of wrestling/fighting until the customer was like “This is bullshit” and walked out. Nobody got hurt (or in trouble), but a few other people in there were watching and laughing a bit.
This is the crazy part: my brother keeps taking the same shift KNOWING he’s going to run into the same customer, and the customer keeps coming back (??!???!) and they have a fistfight. It’s almost a ritual at this point. The customer orders smth, my bro serves him it but it’s inadequate, the customer demands a redo and my bro throws egg toast at his face and then they beat the shit out of each other. I quit going with him after the fourth fight, but I keep seeing posts about it on twitter when people @ the Shibuya Central Street Big Beef Bowl House and those fistfights are becoming legendary (and meme-worthy!).
I’ve tried to talk to him about it a few times, but he keeps saying it’s a matter of principle. I’ve told him to talk to his boss or smth, get that asshole banned, but he just waves me off. You’d think he’d learn instead how this customer likes his stupid beef bowls, but he spends his week learning new ways of preparing egg toasts to piss the customer off more. He has gotten really good at making fried eggs now tbh so I’m not really complaining about that.
My question is: are these two flirting?! They know each other (I know bc the third fight my brother yelled the guy’s name and said smth about glass houses and stones), and I think they even go to the same university. At this point this is like a thing between them. One week the customer didn’t turn up and my brother was so upset and grumpy about it, even though it meant he wasn’t going to be rolling on the bar getting strangled. I’m just worried because this is new behaviour I’ve never seen in him before, but he’s just so obsessed about having these fights with the customer in Big Beef Bowl House and I’m honestly thinking that this is some weird kink for the two of them.
Should I like, ask him that?? Be like, ‘hey, bro, it’s sort of weird that you keep erotically wrestling a customer on Big Beef Bowl House’s counter in front of me and my salad’?? Or maybe he doesn’t know he likes this customer and he’s just acting out because feelings (he is very much a repressed kettle kind of guy)?? I honestly don’t know what to do and tbh I’m tempted just to rip the customer’s phone number from the internet somewhere and tape it to my brother’s stupid forehead and let them deal with it OUTSIDE of Big Beef Bowl House working hours.
Tl;dr my adopted brother keeps getting into fistfights with a customer at Big Beef Bowl House but I think it’s because they have the hots for each other. What should I do to get them to date like normal people?
Edit 1 : the reason my brother hasn’t been fired from Big Beef Bowl House is because he is the sole thing standing between it and bankruptcy
Edit 2 : no police either bc BBBH is like neutral zone where anything can happen tbh it’s a liminal space
Edit 3 : they definitely know each other from university, I’m 100% certain.
Edit 4 : okay it is highly likely they’re flirting bc the customer turned up at Leblanc (guardian’s coffee shop) and the two of them were practically vibrating from repressed sexual tension because they had to be polite to each other it was v. uncomfortable
Edit 5: I can neither confirm nor deny that Akechi Goro is the customer