Chapter Text
The first time Sunny had thought Toriko was beautiful didn’t count. He had been a child—they had both been. Sunny had been young, starving, living a dreary, un-beautiful life in a non-IGO nation where parentless brats like him weren’t protected, so focused on keeping himself and his baby sister alive that he didn’t have the time for beauty—or the means, if he had been so inclined.
And he had been. He had wanted it so badly, to be able to enter the reputable part of town without the stigma, the stink, of his situation following him. To be looked at not as an object of pity, but of envy.
It had been a day of no importance to Sunny (a day of great importance to the country, but how could Sunny believe it) when Ichiryu visited. He came every year, had been doing so since before Sunny had been born, walking through the worst areas of the non-IGO nations and feeding those who couldn’t feed themselves. Sunny had never seen him before, and he didn’t believe that such a person would give freely to dirty orphans like them anyway.
Sunny and Rin had been huddling together under the scant shade offered by a half-fallen awning outside a store that likely should have been abandoned years ago. There was a commotion in an adjacent street that had only been growing louder over the last several minutes; Rin had wanted to go investigate, but Sunny had stubbornly wrapped his arms around her and huddled as far back into the wall as they could go.
As much as he longed to stand proudly in the light, years of experience had taught him that the less noticeable they became the less likely they were to be targeted. And a commotion in this part of town was never a celebration, even if the one coming towards them sounded like it.
The noise grew louder and closer, drawing curious but fleeting glances from the other occupants of the street as well, and finally someone appeared.
It was a boy. Larger than Sunny, but probably not much older. He had blue hair, a blinding grin, and a nearly-full bag slung over his shoulder.
He was beautiful. With his shiny, interesting hair that he didn’t have to hide for fear of being taken and sold, and a grin which held none of the world-weary nature that had been ground into Sunny’s bones.
But that didn’t count.
It didn’t count because Sunny hadn’t really known Toriko then, and he would curse himself for thinking it often as they lived together. It didn’t count because Sunny had never lived anywhere truly beautiful before, had never experienced beauty beyond the fleeting memories he had of his parents, and so his standards had been embarrassingly low.
It didn’t count, most of all, because it hadn’t been a complement.
Back then, beauty was something Sunny aspired to, but not because it was good. Back then, beauty was the gleaming storefront that he was chased from even though he had saved enough money to buy something nice for Rin for her birthday. Beauty had been the people in pressed suits and flowing gowns who turned their noses up at anything different from them. It was the extravagant feasts that those people couldn’t finish, and instead of giving the leftovers to the poor they went into the dumpster with rat poison, to discourage theft.
Beauty was Toriko, unafraid of the streets, unaware of the hardship, carrying what Sunny somehow just knew was more food than he had ever seen, and probably would ever see, for the remainder of his likely-short life.
The fact that he was a child with colored hair and a face that held no malice changed nothing about Sunny’s own weary ways.
“Who—” Rin began to ask, eyes going big and sparkly at the strange newcomer, but Sunny blocked her view and refused to let her oggle him.
“Not our problem,” he grumbled, quiet enough that he was sure the boy couldn’t hear him.
That didn’t seem to matter, as the boy seemed to scent the air for a moment before he zeroed in on them specifically, bounding over and hitting them full force with that beaming grin.
Sunny clutched Rin closer, as if there was some chance the boy hadn’t seen her yet, and fixed him with a deathly glare.
Undeterred, the boy swung the sack off of his shoulder and started digging around in it.
“I’m Toriko!” He greeted finally, emerging from the bag with a large loaf of bread and a few other things that Sunny had never seen before—but they smelled divine. “Will you eat with me?”
Sunny simply continued to glare, this time focused on the food apparently being proffered to them. Was there something wrong with it? Was the boy going to snatch it back at the last second and laugh?
Toriko, undaunted by the suspicious glare, simply plopped himself down right in the middle of the dirty street and went about breaking the large loaf into roughly even thirds and placing the other things (jams, butters, that’s what Toriko was rambling about as Sunny tuned him out) between them so either of them could easily reach. He dug into his portion without hesitation, and the assurance through action that the bread wasn’t poisoned only served to make Sunny more confused about this situation.
So confused, so focused on Toriko and his strangeness, that he hadn’t noticed Rin’s hand shoot out and nick one of the bread chunks. Not until she had already dug in.
“Sunny, it’s so good!” She grinned, mouth so full that crumbs fell onto him while she spoke. His nose scrunched in disgust, but he refrained from complaining because he couldn’t quite bring himself to dampen the bright shine in her eyes.
He made sure to scowl at Toriko as he snatched his own piece, even as the blue-haired boy grinned brightly at Rin’s reaction. As if he was really just here to share food and see people enjoy it.
And that… that was when Sunny should have called Toriko beautiful. But he didn’t. He thought Toriko was weird, that he was stupid, and he was too busy eating the first fresh bread he could remember to give it more thought than that.
“Toriko,” a man’s voice called, and Sunny hurriedly scarfed down the remaining bread. Toriko may have been running around giving out food, but there was no way the adult who had given him that food would be okay with it.
“Old man!” Toriko called back, and a large man with a mustache lugging an even larger bag than Toriko’s stepped out of the same alley where Toriko had appeared. Almost instantly the man’s eyes cut to Sunny, who had made sure to place himself directly in front of Rin as she happily munched on the bread.
“And who do we have here?” He asked, not unkindly, but Sunny glowered in response.
“He smells like me,” Toriko reported happily, pointing directly at Sunny.
Which, Sunny thought, was an absolutely ludicrous assertion. Sunny hadn’t had a proper bath in months and Toriko was clearly from an IGO nation and probably washed every day. If they smelled the same then there was something seriously wrong with Toriko.
The man didn’t seem to agree with Sunny’s analysis, instead simply nodding in agreement.
“He has gourmet cells as well,” he said like that meant anything, eyes slipping between Sunny’s deliberately dirty hair (the white, pink, and blue obscured but still visible if one was looking) and the way he was blocking Rin from the two unknown people.
And then, the question that changed Sunny’s life, asked with all the casual recklessness that Sunny soon came to understand was undeniably Toriko —
“Old man, can we bring them with us?”