But after several minutes of this he sighs and puts his sketchpad away. The sketches didn't look like anything—or, no, that's not true, but they didn't look like anything interesting. He was just drawing the stuff he was seeing, the trees and the waterfront and Rei and the playground and the faceless nameless people enjoying the park just at much as Rei. He doesn't know any of them.

With another sigh he gets up, grabs his stuff, and walks off. If Rei gets upset, well, Towa told him he wasn't going to hang out.

Towa walks aimlessly for about an hour, watching the city and feeling melancholy. That's what he gets for waking up too early, he guesses. It was a tossup between this and being moody and irritated, really.

He should get a new job.

(He should get someone to beat him to a pulp.)

Well, he should say that he should get another job. He has two part-times, technically, one at Roost and one as Fujieda's assistant. Roost doesn't open until 5, though, and today is not one of the days he works with Fujieda, so usually he'd have slept in until noon. Waking up this early is making him feel restless.

Maybe he could do construction work.

Shinkōmi has had a huge influx of construction companies wanting a piece of the juicy pie that is renovating and rebuilding it. With the Takasato-gumi gone and the heightened interest from the mainland in re-establishing the rule of law, the myriad buildings that were not up to code were easy pickings, and that's not to mention District A and the city ruins. So the demand is definitely there.

So is the supply, though. Even people whose main qualification wasn't "being a yakuza leader's son" often didn't have any legible skills; definitely no credentials. But still, Towa can't imagine they'd turn away an able-bodied male with very high pain tolerance. Might put all that working out Fujieda's been having him do to some use.

As he watches one such construction company doing heavy work on one of the buildings in the Residential District the thought makes him unutterably exhausted.

Put that idea in the back burner, then.

(He should find someone to hurt him.)

What else is there? He's got no head for numbers, Roost is using up all of his customer service energy, he's definitely not going to be a doctor. The only things he's good at are drinking, smoking, and taking hurt like a champ.

And painting, he guesses. He hasn't painted anything since he finished painting Fujieda seven months ago, but that's not too unusual for him; he only ever paints when he feels inspired, which in his particular case means finding a new model. He never paints the same person twice.

Except...

When he finds himself looking mournfully at "euphoria"s inbox he knows there's definitely something wrong with him. That nightmare must've affected him worse than he'd thought. He shoves his phone in his coat pocket and starts walking with purpose, because he definitely needs something to distract him. Or else.

"Towa..."

Towa isn't looking at him. It isn't guilt, exactly. He isn't proud of it but he doesn't owe Fujieda anything.

(Except his life.)

"Towa. Look at me."

No.

"Towa."

At the change in Fujieda's tone Towa does lift his eye to meet Fujieda's. It's always a bit jarring to watch him drop the closed-off unreadable poise while in his incredibly professional and well-fitting suit and wearing those glasses. It feels incongruous. Back when they first met, Fujieda's Smoke was a pure unblemished white and it was just as perfectly-controlled and still as his face and body language—it was perfectly-controlled and still because of it. Towa had never met anyone like that before, not even in the yakuza. He'd watched Fujieda lie to his face without giving him the slightest evidence of such. It was one of the things that first drew Towa to him.

Fujieda still wears that armour at work, and often takes a minute to take it off when he gets home, which makes it all the more jarring that he did it so quickly this time. Maybe Towa looks even worse than he thought he did.

Fujieda purses his lips then leans down to kiss Towa's split lip, then his bruised cheekbone, then the scrape on his eyebrow. "Let's go inside?"

He nods wordlessly and follows Fujieda into the deli he'd picked for them to have lunch at.

They usually only have lunch together on days Towa works with him, and  Fujieda is usually so busy that they just order takeout and eat at the office. But in the rare occasions when he has some free time he always tries to suggest somewhere else they could go to eat. It's never the same place twice, which is so very Fujieda, or so had Towa initially thought; Fujieda eventually confessed that he never used to look for variety like that, and he was just trying to make a conscious effort to do it so as to learn how to savour life.

It's one of the many things they surprisingly turned out to have in common, the fact that neither of them knows how to do that.

Towa also has a suspicion that Fujieda didn't exactly have free time today so much as that he made the free time out of concern, which Fujieda soon confirms.

"I was worried about you," he says, as soon as they're at their table looking at their menus. "Are you... how are you feeling?" Even without the forbidden word it was very obvious that Towa was not, in fact, alright.

"Mm." He lights his cigarette and takes a puff. Thankfully Fujieda doesn't have the same objections to smoking while eating that Rei does.

He's not sure what he was expecting. "Do you want to talk about it?"

"Nothing to talk about."

"You are such a bad liar."

Towa lifts his eye up to look at Fujieda again and raises an eyebrow.

"...okay, you're not a bad liar, you were just not even trying to pretend, I guess."

He lowers his eye to the menu again and starts scanning the items absently. Not that that'll matter, he'll either pick something at random or let Fujieda pick for him, but still.

"It wasn't a lie," he insists, quietly.

"I haven't seen you—when was the last time you went out looking for trouble?"

He scoffs. "There isn't trouble in this city anymore."