"And yet you somehow managed to find it anyway. Leave it to you, I guess."

Towa looks up at him again and narrows his eye. One advantage of Fujieda dropping the act around him is that he becomes a lot more readable then. He's...

"...upset. There are many ways to tell when people are upset, but it's always a good idea to look for which ones they're showing, because people who are upset are always looking for someone to tell their sorrows to, and the way they're upset is important. Now, Haruto, can you tell me what you think you need to look for to find out if someone is upset?"

Towa doesn't flinch at the memory, and instead focuses on the practicalities. There's a tension to Fujieda's neck, a slight furrow to his brow. There's a cadence to his questions, and a change to how he's asking them. And, granted, his concern for Towa is a big part of it, but still...

Fujieda is angry.

"You're upset," he observes, bluntly, because that's what works best with Fujieda, and also because—Fujieda had asked him to. He thought Towa would otherwise try to manipulate him into spilling his heart. He wasn't wrong.

Fujieda purses his lips and leans back on his chair, but doesn't respond.

Towa can almost see Fujieda's Smoke turning white and still again. Towa can in point of fact see the practised motions Fujieda goes through to control his body language perfectly. He looks away and takes another drag of his cigarette. "Hypocrite much?"

"Now is not the time."

Towa doesn't respond. If it's not the time for Fujieda then it's damn well not the time for Towa, either.

Fujieda remains quiet for a while, but when the waiter arrives to get their orders he tells them his. Then he glances at Towa to see if he's going to evince an opinion and, when he doesn't, picks something for Towa, too.

He turned to look at Fujieda from the corner of his eye while that was happening, and once again marvelled. Fujieda's facial expression did change, to talk to the waiter, and yet Towa's read of him changed not at all. His body language was as still as the surface of milk in a glass, and just as opaque.

Or... no. No, that's not true, Towa realises with a start. He's had this narrative in his head about Fujieda, and it was true when they first met, but now... either Fujieda isn't wearing his full armour or Towa himself has spent enough time with him to start to pick up on Fujieda's microscopic tells that he never could before. Just out of familiarity.

For some reason that thought forms a knot in his stomach and he looks away again.

But what his instincts are telling him—and it is his instincts, because though the image of Fujieda's face just now is still vividly clear in his mind he couldn't begin to tell you which specific features of it were informing him of what—is that Fujieda has something he wants to say. Which, on the one hand, no duh, but on the other...

Towa turns to look at Fujieda again, and starts studying his face and eyes.

Fujieda notices this and meets his gaze, impassively.

This almost brings a smile to Towa's lips—Fujieda is just not winning this particular game of chicken—but smiling would be the wrong move here, so he doesn't. He keeps his eye steady and still, locked into Fujieda's.

He eventually averts his eyes.

"I have my first aid kit on me," he says.

That was a dodge. Towa keeps watching him. "You can fix me up in the restroom, then."

"?"

"It's not just my face."

"...of course." He stands up and, after asking an employee where the restroom is, walks there.

Towa follows and, as soon as they're inside, takes his shirt off. He has extensive bruises decorating his skin, on his stomach and ribs and back, plus some scrapes and a couple of cuts.

Or rather, a couple of cuts that look obviously like they came from a fight. There are three clean straight lines on the right side of his stomach right below his ribcage, one of them intersecting one of the bruises. They're mostly scabbed over, though, and the T-shirt he's wearing (which is not the same one he'd been wearing in the morning) isn't damp with either blood or sweat. Nor dusty, either.

Towa takes another drag of his cig and puffs it out to the side.

"Have you applied disinfectant to the wounds?"

"No."

He fetches his first aid kit from his bag, sets it down on the sink, and starts fishing around in it for what he needs.

Towa hops onto the sink and watches him do that. Sitting there, he's a bit taller than Fujieda, which is a feeling he appreciates from time to time.