"Oh, um..." And he blushes as his eyes to shiny in nostalgia. "It was love at first sight. He was so brave and strong and handsome, I couldn't help but fall in love~ Then I visited him at his house and gave your gran some cheesecake from that shop you love and..."

Inori has long since stopped paying attention. Useless.

"That's hard to answer," says Kuroji. "I love the way he treats his family, and he's such an attentive guy, and, um." Blush. "I really like how much he loves me..."

Also useless.

So, if his dads can't help, he's gonna try fiction. He's always steered clear of the romance section in the manga store, but it might hold the answer to his plight. And there's a romantic comedy section? He thought romances were meant to be serious, how can they be comedy as well? But that's a good sign, if there's some way in which romance works that he didn't know then maybe it'll be informative.

"Yamada."

He turns to the source of the voice. "Who—oh. Tōkan's shitty alpha friend."

"I want to introduce myself properly. I'm Kageyama Subaru." He extends his hand.

Inori looks down at the hand then back up at Subaru's face, then decides to stop wasting his time and turn back to his manga search.

Subaru suppresses a twinge of annoyance and recenters before lowering his hand back down. "I want to start over," he continues, "without being 'shitty' to you."

"Why?"

"Because I... want to know who it is that finally succeeded at catching him."

Inori throws him a dirty look.

He raises his hands in surrender. "Bad joke, sorry, I didn't mean it that way. Just... you know, heir of the Kokonoe clan, and generally a pretty nice and friendly and kind and attractive person, he's had suitors trying to win his heart for as long as we've known each other."

"And what do you want from me? You two are already fucking, aren't you?"

"—I don't know why I'm surprised he told you that. You're... not... exclusive?"

Inori once again does not deign to reply to a stupid question with an obvious answer.

"Right. He'd obviously not just run around behind your back."

He scoffs and rolls his eyes.

It's taking all of Subaru's willpower to not snap back at Inori, but there's a part of him that wonders how much of it is just... him being unused to people not just sucking up to him all the time. He is not a Kokonoe but he's still in the upper eschelons of society right there. "It's not really... I don't want anything from you. I just want to get to know you."

"Fine. Buy these for me, then," he says, giving a surprised Subaru a pile of romantic comedies.

Okay... Sure, why not.

"And buy me ice cream."

"...uh..."

"You're paying for my time so you better pay well."

This is the weirdest person Subaru has ever met but maybe... you kinda have to be, to succeed at seducing Tōkan. They walk in silence while Inori reads one of the manga he just got while twirling his lead pipe in his other hand. After he gets both of them some ice cream he asks, "You like romantic comedies?" And he doesn't add "you don't seem the type" because he feels like Inori would not respond well to that.

"Dunno. Never read any."

"So what made you decide to start?"

"I wanna figure out what 'love' is."

Subaru nearly chokes on his ice cream and has to cough into a napkin for a few seconds. And then he consciously skips over an incredulous "you don't know?" and a meaningless "why?" to go to "You want to figure out if you like Tōkan?"

"Yep."

He sighs and leans forward and down enough to get his chin resting on the table, holding his ice cream cone with one hand next to his face. This is terribly undignified but it's... honest. And this guy clearly values honesty. "I'm surprised anyone wouldn't be."

Inori looks at him suspiciously.

"He's just so nice. And a good person with good priorities, and he's... much braver than I am."

"Braver?"

"...when we met, he rescued me from some bullies. I'd just been playing with some beta and omega kids at the park and then the alphas showed up and started bullying me about how I was dirty for doing that, how I needed to stay with the superior kids..."

Inori inhales and looks clearly enraged.

"They started pushing me around—I was small, for an alpha my age—then Tōkan showed up and got them all to back off and said a bunch of words I'm pretty sure a seven-year-old isn't meant to know to tell those alphas just how pathetic they were being. And then I grew up to become just as pathetic.

"He never swallowed the party line. Not even pretended to. Even with his dad being who he is. He just... kept fighting it and fighting it even if it made people mad at him and made him unpopular... Alpha kids fight a lot." He scoffs, then lifts his head to get some more of his ice cream before it melts. "Alphas fight a lot. We got the highest mortality rates and a lot of it is us getting into dumb fights. So he fought a lot, but he fought for everyone. All the bullied kids. And the bullies when other kids tried to retaliate against them. It's really hard to be mad at someone who's like that."

"Are you done yet? You're boring me."

Subaru sighs. "He stands up for what he believes in, and it kinda crushes him. So many of the kids he grew up with started becoming... unapologetic rapists. And all the other kids have to pretend it's fine because if we don't then we have to admit that the people we know are horrible."

"I'm so sorry about all the reasons you have to make raping me okay."

"It's not okay! It's never okay! It's shit! But we're not him and if we start making as much noise as him then we'll be all alone."

"Better be alone than surrounded by shitty alphas."

"...yeah. It is."

"Stop making excuses." He finishes his ice cream cone then grabs the extra large ice cream cup he also had Subaru buy him and starts stabbing at it with the spoon. "We don't care. We don't give a shit. You're not the ones being groped in the bus by someone three times your age when you're eleven and your first heat came too soon. And we like it a little bit and do you have any idea how disgusting that makes us feel? And people like you keep telling us we deserved it so much that we start to believe it."

Subaru doesn't ask if that's what happened to Inori. It doesn't matter, really. The point is well taken. He doesn't protest either because... yeah, he personally never did anything like that himself, but the one who got furious with Hōji and Karato the minute he heard about it was Tōkan, not him.

"I think you probably do. Like him, that is."

Inori looks at him again and narrows his eyes. "What do you know about that?"

"I know what having feelings for Kokonoe Tōkan looks like."

"...fine. What does it look like?"

"You."

"That's fucking useless."

"There is not just a single thing that's love. It changes for everyone."

"Hm."

"But what do you feel if you imagine losing him?"

Inori flinches without meaning to then glares at Subaru again.

"And now imagine that you read all of those manga and you reach the conclusion that you don't like him. What are you going to feel then? Are you gonna say 'well I guess that's that, it's been a good run'?"

"No!"

"So you have your answer."

"That makes no sense."

"Love never does."

Stab stab stab and eat. "That doesn't help."

"You choose what to call it, then, but the fact is that you're terrified of losing him—"

"I'm not scared of anything!"

"—you would be really upset and angry if you lost him, then. And you want to spend more time with him and you want him to be near you even if you're not really talking or doing anything, and you like to touch him and when you wake up in the morning next to him you wanna cry."

"I never cry. ...also I told him all of that and it didn't matter."

"Tōkan is a sucker for narratives, Yamada. A bit too much, and a bit too deep. Calling it 'feelings' matters to him. But you're clearly head over heels for him already and I'm so fucking jealous," and he accidentally crushes his ice cream cone when he says that and has to use a napkin to clean the mess. "...I'm so jealous that you get to have him and I don't. But you're something else, I get that now. So at least... let me live vicariously through you. Love him for me, okay? ...and maybe tell me what it feels like, after."

"...you sound like him."

"Huh?"

"It's like you wrote a whole speech or somethin'. Posh shitty alphas."

Subaru smiles a bit. "Yeah, we are that."