"Good! Then yeah, I am."

Towa blows the smoke to the side, taps his cigarette on the ashtray, and peers at Rei with a half-lidded eye.

"Honestly, do you have to smoke while we're eating?"

Towa rolls his eye, shrugs, and crushes his cigarette into the ashtray.

"Much better!"

"Here's your food!" says the arriving waitress with a smile, placing the coffee and one of the honey toasts in front of Towa and the other toast and the milkshake in front of Rei.

"Thank you! Ahh, that looks delicious, itadakimasu!"

Towa watches the waitress leave, lifting his coffee to his lips and sipping it. It's too hot even for him, seeing as it actually seems to have burned his tongue, so he starts blowing on it.

Rei seems oblivious, and true to form is having the time of his life with his food.

He turns back to look at Rei and once again peers thoughtfully at him.

Towa used to be able to see people's auras, which he called Smoke because to him it looked like smoke, a cloud of it sticking to everyone he met. Everyone had a characteristic colour, though it changed sometimes, and it always moved in different ways depending on what they were feeling. Rei's Smoke used to be a bright yellow, shifting to an angry red and thrashing about whenever he got upset. It was very expressive, and Towa could always read him like a book.

It sounded crazy, and he often considered it pretty strong evidence that he himself was nuts, some sort of hallucination that indicated how frayed his sanity was. Recovering his memories basically confirmed it: ever since he did, he's stopped seeing people's Smoke, and instead he's now able to pay attention to all of the subtle cues of body language and expression that his brain had probably been trying to hide from him. And it can get really unpleasant, because he can't turn it off, it happens before he can even think, and sometimes it comes accompanied by Maya's commentary; she was the one who taught him all of it, after all. So he'll be watching people, getting more from them than they think they're giving him, and hearing Maya's voice quietly informing him of what he should be taking away from what he's seeing.

On the bright side, it's been happening less and less often. As he develops new associations between these observations and new memories, they slowly displace the old ones. That does involve having to look directly at the unpleasant memories as they come so that he can then create his own, personal version of them, but it's better than just trying (and failing) to shut it out.

This is all to say that he doesn't buy Rei's cheer. "What's bothering you?" he asks, curtly.

"Man, nothing gets past you, does it," he says, sighing grumpily as he puts his spoon down.

"Mm."

"It's... Taku. I had a call with him this morning."

"Oh? How is he?"

"He... sounds fine. Or, like... I don't know, pretends he's fine? It's hard to tell. It's, you know, prison. And it'll be another year and four months, he's not even halfway through his sentence, it'll be so long before he's out..."

"Why do you think he's faking it?"

"I mean, he must be, right? It's prison. And the other people there did much worse things than him—well, I guess maybe not, but he was pressured into it, and he regretted it and really didn't want to do it..."

"Hmm. I don't know. Sounds fine to me."

"Other people aren't so blasé about being surrounded by criminals as you."

He shrugs slightly. "But Taku would be."

"It's different," Rei insists.

"Only because the people there are the ones that got caught."

"It's not just that! Even the gang had a, a code, right? It's a free-for-all in prison, they can do whatever they want with him..."

"Sounds like a fun time."

"Towa."