"Towa! Towa! Wake up! Towa, I'm here!" Fujieda is holding Towa close to his chest and looking down at his face, running one hand through Towa's hair in calming motions while he waits for the nightmare throes to subside.

I know you're here, dumbass, Towa thinks to himself, but he's too busy having trouble breathing, between the gasps and gulps afflicting his body, to actually say it. I'm not blind. The words don't come out, and he feels like he's dying, feels like he's suffocating, the soft night light is simultaneously too bright and too dark, it looks like it's going to blind him and the shadows look like they're moving, like there could be people there, like there are voices—

"I̸̛̬t̷̨̓'̴̺͐ṡ̵̜ ̴͉̄ả̷̝l̶̝̓r̴̳͌i̷̱̕g̵̥͑h̷̦̑t̸̢̿..."

"SHUT UP!" he screams, pushing Fujieda away and pulling himself up against the wall, hugging his knees close to his chest. Now he can breathe, but the problem is that he's breathing far, far too much, and his body is readying him for a fight, or more likely for flight, he needs to run, needs to get away, needs to go somewhere safe...

This is really stupid, observes the part of his brain that's not having the nightmare-induced panic attack. Maya is dead, you're not with her right now, you are safe.

Shut up, he repeats inside his own mind to that part, because just because it's right doesn't mean it gets to be condescending at him.

"...Towa..."

"The light—turn on the light—" he manages to say, he almost goes dizzy from saying because he doesn't have enough air for it, but it occured to him that if there are no shadows then he can't be convinced that they're—that she is hiding in them.

"—I will," he says, and immediately reaches over to the switch next to his side of the bed to turn the lights on (even though Towa himself could've done it with the switch that's next to his side of the bed).

Those lights are a lot more blinding than that feeble night light had been and it takes him a few seconds to be able to look at anything without his eye watering—or, well, watering more, it's puffy from crying already—and he tries to will his heart and breathing to slow down while he looks around the room to convince himself that he really isn't back there, Maya really isn't there, Mei is most definitely not there—

(because she's dead)

—but the thing that really helps him calm down is looking at Fujieda's concerned face. I've got it down bad, he observes to himself, distantly.

"Towa..."

He doesn't say anything, but he doesn't look away from Fujieda, either. It's helping, looking at him. Calming.

Fujieda doesn't look away, either, and just keeps watching Towa's breathing for a few minutes.

"Are you—feeling better?" he asks, catching himself in the middle. He's been doing well at not saying that word, recently, but he's still not perfect. And while it wouldn't be a total disaster to say it right now, right after a nightmare is still not the best time for him to slip up.

Towa catches the hesitation and guesses what was going to go there, and funnily enough that's the last thing he needs to calm down enough to speak.

"Yeah," he says, slowly, after a while of chewing on it. "I think so."

He lets out a breath and smiles a bit. "Good. I'm glad. Do you need anything?"

"Smokes and booze," he replies almost on autopilot.

Fujieda's smile widens, because if Towa's asking for that, that means he's coming back to himself. He doesn't really approve of Towa's vices but they've been through this dance before, and he can't find it in himself to deny Towa them right after a nightmare like that. He hops off the bed to go fetch them for Towa.

By the time he's back Towa's no longer hugging himself, and looks a lot more relaxed, sitting cross-legged on the bed and looking at nothing. His face softens even more when he notices Fujieda, and he holds out his hands for his vices.

Fujieda gives him the bottle of whiskey and puts the cigarette between Towa's lips, then lights it for him and sits back down on the bed.

He takes a good, long drag of his cigarette, puffs the smoke out away from Fujieda, and starts sipping from his whiskey. It burns his throat as it goes down, even more so for how slowly he's doing it, but the burn helps clear his head.

Back when they first started living together the smoke really bothered him, but by now he's mostly used to it. It helps that smoke tends to get into everything so now his whole apartment smells of it; he couldn't help but get accustomed. He fetches his phone from the bedside table and begins to catch up on his emails and notifications.

"Sorry for waking you," Towa says, eventually, looking down at his legs. "What's the time?"

"Six fifty-seven," he replies, though the blackout blinds block the light sufficiently well that it could have been four AM or four PM for all either of them knew. His alarm is set for 7AM so he wasn't awoken that much earlier than he'd have had to wake up anyway. "It's not a problem, you don't need to apologise."

Fujieda says that every time. "Hmm," is Towa's noncommittal response. He pulls another drag of his cigarette in, then slowly puffs it out, reaching out to tap it against the ashtray he keeps on his bedside table. The compromise he and Fujieda reached in the end was that he wouldn't keep his cigarettes by the bed but he would keep the ashtray for these inevitable mornings after a nightmare.

"Today's was particularly bad, huh?" he asks after about half an hour, once Towa looks—mostly grounded.

"Hmm," he replies, without looking up from his phone, but he noticeably droops when his attention is brought back to it.

"Do you want to tell me about it?"

Towa looks away. "You won't want to know."

"If I didn't want to know I wouldn't have asked," he replies, reasonably, and to prove the point he puts his own phone away, face down on his bedside table, then pulls away a bit from Towa to be able to properly look him in the face.

That brings a small smile to Towa's lips. So very himself.

And then he thinks back on the nightmare and the smile evaporates. He puts his phone, his glass of whiskey (his third this morning), and his cigarette (his second this morning) down and hugs himself. "It was... Mei."

...Fujieda drags himself closer to Towa again to wrap an arm around him. Nightmares involving Mei are always the worst for Towa, especially because he feels extra guilty about telling Fujieda them. Fujieda himself has made his peace with them—mostly. He knows they are going to happen regardless, is what that boils down to, even if he would be lying if he said he isn't affected. Nevertheless, he promised to be there for Towa no matter what, and he intends to keep that promise.

Towa sighs and leans into him.

After a couple more minutes he prods again: "Anything new?"

"There's never anything new," he replies immediately. "...just variations. I never—" But he suddenly gets a lump in his throat that blocks his words, and when he looks down at his hands he notices he's balled them into fists and they're trembling. When did that happen? he wonders, idly. He forces them open, stretches his fingers, and reaches over for his cigarette again, but by now it's really more of a nervous tic than in expectation that it'll help. The nicotine has been in his system long enough that he's not getting any more benefit from yet another drag.

He drags anyway.

This time Fujieda doesn't prod him again. He just waits for Towa to find his words.

"...I never hurt her," he manages, eventually. "Or anyone else. Did you know?"

He shakes his head slowly. He... hadn't known, really. He sort of assumed that Towa would've, but if he never did, does that mean that his role was always of the passive victim?

"Maya never made me. I don't know if her clients also never asked, though I can't imagine that would be the case. Rather, I... think she just wanted me to learn from others, before I ever tried it myself. So that I wouldn't get locked into any bad habits early on, before I knew what I was doing."

"I... see. That makes sense." From what they know of Maya, at least.

"I'm just guessing. I don't know. She never told me. But I never... hurt anyone else."

"...and Mei did?" Fujieda guesses.

Towa nods wordlessly. "I think my mother made everyone do that. Or almost everyone. I was the only exception. Or so I assume."

"But Mei hurt you."

He nods. "She always apologised. Afterwards, not during, Maya's clients wouldn't want that. But when they couldn't see, she looked like she... hated it. Of course she hated it. We all hated it."

Fujieda feels like he should be angry, like that description should be filling him with rage, but those fires have long since been extinguished. He just feels numb, and tired. Maya's dead, and so is Mei, and so is Sakaki, and that place is no more, and it'll never come back, so he just doesn't really have it in him anymore, to hate it. He just nods, and starts running his fingers through Towa's hair again.

"I dreamt that I was hurting her. I never did... but in the dream I did. And in the dream I was saying—" There's a lump in his throat again, and Towa notices that he's crying once more. He's kind of used to it, to being not okay like this, but today's proving to be particularly bad. He can feel a migraine forming, and he grabs his whiskey to finish downing it in one go then takes another puff of his cig.

He continues to not say anything, and to just hold Towa. He had a feeling that that was what the dream had been about, from how Towa started recounting it. From the way Towa is tensing up, he imagines that Towa's almost expecting him to get angry at him or something. But of course he won't.

He tries to get his breathing and his tears under control, but instead what seems to be happening is that he's starting to cry harder. Really inconvenient.

"I-I'm sorry," he says, and at that he breaks down into sobs again. "I s-said. I'm s-sorry." He traces a line in the middle of his chest, along the biggest scar he has there. "Ik-kuina's scar. I w-was m-meant to replic-cate it. Give Mei a scar j-just like th-this one."

...oh. That... sounds incredibly upsetting. He rearranges himself to pull himself closer to Towa and hug him more tightly, and he kisses the top of Towa's head.

Towa seems completely oblivious to it. His eye is unfocused, and he is crying freely, and his right eye socket is throbbing dully. His left hand's lying limply on his thigh, his cigarette all but forgotten, and even the hot ashes falling onto his skin aren't getting a reaction out of him.

"She s-smiled. She said it wasn't m-my fault." He hiccups and squeezes his eye shut and tries to remember why he's saying all of this. Why he's making himself go through this. But now he can't seem to stop. "She s-said she d-didn't blame me. And she s-said..."

"I̷͇͛t̸́͜'̴̟̈s̵͙̿ ̶̞͛a̴̗͌l̵̫̈́r̵̡̂ï̷͕g̴̪͆ḧ̵̬́t̴̯̐.̵̫̓"

He takes in a sharp breath, quickly enough that he chokes on it and starts coughing. This mixes really badly with the sobbing and he's having a lot of trouble breathing again.

But his eye looks like someone's thrown a bucket of cold water on him. Did he say it out loud? He thinks he might have. It felt like—like Maya was—but she's dead. And he's not Maya. No matter what, he is not her.

"...and then I woke up," he finishes quietly, eventually, once his coughing has subsided some and he no longer feels like he's being hunted.

Fujieda hasn't let go of him for even a second, hasn't stopped petting him and trying to soothe him as best he can. "Would you like me to work from home today?" he asks, in a subdued tone, once Towa is done recounting the dream.

Towa feels like he should be laughing at that, or maybe crying more, but instead that seems to have entirely drained his emotions into a pit somewhere. He feels cold. "No," he replies curtly. "That's ridiculous."

"Towa..."

"I need some air," he says, suddenly, pushing Fujieda away and getting up to go find his clothes.

Fujieda silently watches Towa get dressed, grab his phone, cigarettes, and keys, and leave without saying goodbye. He sighs to himself and starts getting ready for work.

Shinkōmi was made for him, Towa's always felt. An ugly, scarred face, with an even uglier, more scarred interior. The kind of place where he could find some random alley and get some people to beat the shit out of him until he was almost dead and no one would come investigate.

Well. Not strictly true. He had a really hard time finding anyone who would actually beat him to near death, since the way to get there is by trying to beat him to death and then failing. Most people wouldn't try that hard.

And also, it's not really true at all anymore, or it's on its way to becoming not true. It's been eight months since Sakaki and Toono died, and the gang followed shortly after. With the opportunity and the power vacuum, the mainland finally got their people here and now they're trying to get this place under control.

That's right, that means real cops. Real cops that won't beat the shit out of him even if he asks nicely.

And he shouldn't be strategising about how to get his ass kicked. That's what a therapist would call "an unhealthy coping mechanism", not that Towa's ever met a therapist. Nor, he muses, has he ever met a healthy coping mechanism.

Most importantly, though, it would make Fujieda sad, and Towa has been observing, with great annoyance, that that has started to matter more and more to him as time goes on. If he were smart he'd just run away, but he's not smart, he's never been smart, and he's not running away. Besides, the time to run away was two months ago when Fujieda first invited him to move in, not now. It's too late now.

That line of thought brings a smile to his face. He's been smiling a lot, recently, and he's finding that he doesn't even mind it that much. He's not running away, and if Fujieda isn't kicking him out then he supposes he's staying.

But that means that he can't try to go looking for people to inflict grievous bodily harm on him and so he has to find other ways to cope. And maybe he could go looking for sex instead but he hasn't brushed his teeth and his face looks like a disgusting mess from all of the crying and he promised Fujieda that he was going to try to limit himself to reputable, clean hookups.

(He had been half joking when he brought it up, and he was surprised by how seriously Fujieda took the question, though in retrospect he shouldn't have been; that was just how Fujieda was. And contrary to his expectations, Fujieda hadn't actually been assuming they'd be exclusive, even though Towa himself wouldn't have actually minded it that much. Fujieda said that,

"I want to support you and be a good thing in your life. I know... who you are. And I don't want you to become someone else for me. I just want you to become—happy."

and for reasons Towa didn't want to examine at the time they were forced to stop that conversation in the middle so that Towa could get Fujieda to fuck his brains out. But the end result is that they aren't exclusive, technically, even though Towa hasn't actually been with anyone else since.)

So, coping mechanisms: incredible violence is out, inadvisable sex is out, he's just walked out on Fujieda and he will die before he goes back home with his tail between his legs to beg for Fujieda's attention even while he knows Fujieda would never begrudge him it. What's left?

What do other people use to cope?

Drugs—he's got a cig between his lips, he's already half drunk, and he's not interested in the harder kinds.

Exercise—he supposes he's going on a walk, right now, though that hardly even counts, he always walks everywhere, but also Fujieda has gotten him to start working out and it was just a lot less effort to go along with it than to try to resist so he's been exercising a lot actually. He'll keep it in the back of his mind as an option, he guesses.

Food—hmm. He still doesn't really like food but he hasn't eaten anything today and he might as well go to Tajima's and grab some snacks there.

And as a bonus, he'll get to see that painting.

With that destination in mind, he walks.

The owner of the snack shop is a lady in her eighties who has lived in Shinkōmi since before it was called that, and certainly before the Takasato-gumi had taken over. She's a tough little thing, and Towa sometimes thinks that she's going to outlive him. He's never sure if she likes him, because while she's always incredibly curt and rude with him, she is that with everyone, and she does seem to appreciate his money. Towa himself finds that he's pretty fond of her, in that way people are sometimes fond of an old park that isn't quite so badly maintained that it's unpleasant to be in and which has a certain quaint charm and a nostalgic air.

When he walks into the shop she looks up and makes a displeased noise. "You look like shit."

"Yeah," he agrees, but he doesn't really look at her. Instead, he looks up at the corner where the wall to his right meets the ceiling. There's a painting there, one that always brings him—something akin to happiness.

That was the painting that inspired Towa to become a painter, when he was a small child. He saw it once and asked Maya to get it for him, and so she did, but it never even got hung on any walls back at the mansion and he forgot about it alongside all of his other memories. But the most frustrating part is that Old Tajima acquired this painting years ago—from Maya herself—and Towa never recognised it, because his brain had been blocking it out of his vision as a way to protect his sanity from the effects remembering his childhood would have.

Now he can see it, and though the memory is associated with Maya, it's also... good. Beautiful.

"Are you going to buy something or not?" Tajima says, impatiently. She usually lets Towa stare at the painting for a little bit whenever he visits but "a little bit" isn't actually that long.

That is a dance he is used to. "Yeah," he replies, lowering his gaze back to the store proper. He picks a bunch of stuff up at random, not really paying attention to what any of it is, then places it in a bag and offers it to Tajima.

"400 yen."

Towa slaps a thousand yen bill on the counter. "Keep the change."

"Hmm. Come back soon."

That, too, is part of their usual dance. With the snacks in tow, he exits the shop.

"—Towa?"

Towa looks up from his phone and spots Rei across the street from him. He pockets it and waits for his friend to walk over to him.

"You're up early," he says. "I mean, a lot earlier than usual. And, um, you look..."

"Like shit. Yeah."

"Are you a̸͓̥̭͘̚l̴͍̈͋r̶͈̀̕ĭ̸̖͙̙̀g̵̦̀͠h̶̢͇̰́͘͝ṭ̸͔̎̄?" Then he covers his mouth. He's a lot less good than Fujieda at not saying the word. "—ah, sorry, I—"

"Nightmare," he says, cutting Rei off. "Bad one."

"...oh. Is there, um—"

"No."

"...right."

"Anyway!" he says, flipping a switch to cheerfulness to try to smooth over the topic. "Were you just at Tajima's?"

"Yeah."

"What were—wait. Is that meant to be your breakfast?" he asks, gesturing at Towa's bag.

"Yeah."

"No, sir, that's not healthy at all. Come on, I was on my way to Yanagawa's, let's eat together there. Your treat."

"My treat?"

"Are you or are you not dating and living with a lawyer who has insane amounts of money?"

"Yeah."

"So: your treat."

Towa sighs but doesn't resist. With Rei, it's always easier to just go along with whatever he wants, even for small things like this.

So he drags Towa along with him to the Café and orders two honey toasts, a black coffee for Towa, and a strawberry milkshake for himself.

"Splurging on Fujieda's money, huh?"

"—do you think he'd mind?"

Towa leans back and takes a drag of his cigarette. "Nah."

"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."

He shrugs again, reaches for his pack of cigarettes, then aborts that gesture and lifts his coffee mug to his lips again. There, it's less hot by enough now, if still a lot hotter than people who aren't him would be comfortable with. "I think you have a wrong image of what prison is like. Or a wrong image of what the gang was like. Maybe both."

"I also had to deal with the Takasato-gumi, you know."

"Only barely. Not as much as Taku did." Or Towa himself, though that goes without saying. "He was working with Toono directly. That would be both better and worse than being a regular gang grunt, in a lot of different ways. And Taku can hold his own."

"I mean... I know he can, but... I still worry."

Another shrug. "Sounds like a great way to spend a lot of time feeling bad about something you can't change."

"Aren't you worried about him? That's cold."

"Like I said, nothing I can change. There's no point."

"Fujieda-san..."

"Was his defence attorney and got him the best deal he could possibly get."

"I guess that's true..."

"So no, I'm not worried," he says, leaning back on his chair again. "And you shouldn't be either."

Rei pouts but doesn't really have a reply to that. "...hey, you need to eat. You haven't touched your food at all."

Right. Food. That was the whole reason he came here, right?

He lowers his eye to the thick slice of toast covered in honey and butter, a brick of carbs and sugar and fat, and stabs his fork into a corner to split it off and put it in his mouth. It tastes like carbs and sugar and fat, and nothing he particularly likes, but he doesn't hate it either. It's okay. But he doesn't really understand why people use food to cope. What does it help with? If he'd been starving or really meaningfully impacted by the lack it'd be one thing, but he isn't, and it's not really helping one way or the other.

That said... he is feeling better than he was this morning. He's not entirely sure why, but the most likely explanation is that it's just been enough time since he woke up that the nightmare's gotten blurry. It's not affecting him anymore.

"Honestly, you're hopeless," he sighs. "I'd hoped maybe Fujieda-san would help but..."

"He can't cook."

"—what? Seriously?!"

"Yeah."

"Can't be worse than you, though."

"He burns ramen."

At that Rei is too shocked for words.

"And I cook better than you think. I think you rubbed off on me."

"I mean... maybe but... Fujieda-san can't...?"

"Yeah."

"Wow. I. He looks so, so..."

"Perfect."

Rei grins. "When you put it like that it does sound kind of silly."

"He can be very, very dense in some ways. We visited the ocean a couple of months ago. Neither of us had, before. He said that that'd be our first 共同作業* in getting back the childhood we never had."

(* Literally, "collaborative effort", but it's a phrase without a direct translation to English with connotations of endeavours married couples do together.)

"—eh? Really? Did he mean...? Two months ago?"

"He didn't."

"Seriously?"

"Yeah."

"Man... you're running my image of him."

"It's there to be ruined."

Now it's Rei's turn to peer at Towa thoughtfully. "You really are head over heels for him, huh?" he asks in a teasing tone.

Is he? "I suppose I am."

"...eh? You're admitting it? Just like that?"

"Yeah."

"You really have changed."

"I'm glad."

"Tch."

"Now finish your food, mister, we're not leaving until you've eaten the whole thing."

Towa sighs and resumes eating, even though he's really not that hungry. "You don't have work this morning, then?"

"Nope! And I was planning to go to Emoto Park afterwards to cheer myself up. D'you wanna come with?"

"Pass."

"You've got other plans?"

"No."

"Wow... so heartless. I'm hurt."

Towa offers Rei another shrug and continues to eat.

He does end up going to Emoto Central Park with Rei, despite his earlier words. Rei finds a sunny spot of grass to sit but Towa picks a bench in the shade. He likes the sun better than he used to, nowadays, but the glare still bothers him, and the bench is just more comfortable than the grass, in his opinion.

After a couple of minutes of smoking in silence and watching the autumn leaves fall, Towa decides to reach into one of his coat's oversized pockets for his sketchpad and a pencil and draw.

As usual he doesn't really pick something to draw in advance. He just looks at the blank page and starts drawing. One could say Towa is just channelling his muse if one were feeling poetic, but even that ironic apophasis escapes his mind when he gets down to it and starts sketching. His hand moves and moves and shapes begin to take form on the paper.

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."

"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.

"This is going to sting," he says, and starts cleaning and disinfecting the wounds, causing many of them to start bleeding again.

Towa shivers and his eye flutters shut. He can never get Fujieda to hurt him, and even though sex with Fujieda is incredible and has been better than any of the sex he used to have—which used to involve a lot more pain—Towa still misses it. Soon enough he finds himself tenting his pants.

Fujieda—

—notices—

—but ignores it to continue his ministrations. Once he's done treating the cuts and scrapes he gets bandages and applies them onto Towa's skin, carefully and perfectly-aligned.

Whenever he acts like this, Towa wants to ruin him. He wants to tear down that armour, he wants to get a rise out of him. Perfectly-aligned bandages. To be fair, he did get a lot of practice, especially after meeting Towa, and Taku had remarked in the past that Fujieda really knew what he was doing, but still, it was so pointlessly precise.

These feelings are usually pretty short-lived, especially since he does, in fact, get to see Fujieda with his guard down almost every day, whenever he's not on a business trip, but still. Right this second it's really annoying him, and he's finding that the earlier fight didn't quite quench his thirst for someone to hurt him.

...for Fujieda to hurt him.

"Your legs?" he asks, straightening up.

"Nothing this bad," he says, focusing his eye on Fujieda again.

"Understood," he says, and packs his kit back up. "Let's go, then." He turns around to leave—

"So are we going to have lunch like this?" Towa asks, without putting his shirt back on or hopping off the sink.

He stops in his tracks.

"Fine by me," he continues. "Just wondering."

Fujieda squeezes and stretches his fingers—

—then relaxes them again and turns back around. "What do you mean?"

He's no longer smirking by the time Fujieda's looking at him. He hops off the sink, pulls his shirt shirt back on, and starts to walk out. "Let's go, then," he echoes.

Fujieda takes in a sharp breath and doesn't move—

(Towa walks past him and counts in his head, three, two, one...)

—"Wait."

(Bingo.)

He turns around and lifts a questioning eyebrow.

Fujieda takes another second before turning around, himself, and something about Towa's face infuriates him.

—ah.

"You..."

Towa cracks.

(On purpose.)

"Hmm?"

Fujieda opens and closes his hands again but his poise is gone. "Drop it. I told you not to do that with me."

"Yeah." He folds one arm over his chest and lifts his cigarette to his lips with his free hand. He takes a long, slow drag, exhales the smoke to the side, then looks at Fujieda again. "You told me to be blunt. Didn't work."

"...I said it's not the time. You can't just—Towa, sometimes we don't get what we want."

"Maybe you don't."

"Towa," he says, his voice dropping a few degrees.

He takes the one step needed to close the distance between them, holding his cigarette out to the side and bringing his face inches away from Fujieda's. "What are you going to do about it?"

At that he lets out a long breath and his anger fades away. "I'm not going to hurt you."

"Tch." Towa looks away. "I know. That's why I have to look for other people to do it."

"...are you trying to blackmail me?"

He laughs mirthlessly before looking at Fujieda again. "Weird kind of blackmail. No. I'm just saying."

"That's not—fair—"

"Now is not the time."

"—Towa!"

"Are you angry with me? Finally?"

Deep breath. "At home. Let's talk about this at home. I really don't have time."

"Do you have time for a quickie? Slam me against a wall, take out your frustrations on me? It wouldn't hurt me that much."

"We're not doing this. I'm not doing this. I wanted to—" He cuts himself off.

...that was unexpected. "Wanted to?"

"...let's go back to the table. I'll tell you there." And this time he resolves to walk back regardless of what Towa does.

Towa senses this, and follows.

Their food is waiting for them there, getting cold. After he sits back down he pulls his bag up again and starts rummaging through it.

...curious. Towa sits across the table from him and waits.

He finds the documents he was looking for and places them on the table then slides them over to Towa. "I got your documents."

...?

"For the mainland. Birth certificate and national ID and passport."

"I don't need that."

"You'll need it if you ever want to travel."

"I don't."

"But I do."

"You can."

"Are you being purposefully obtuse? With you."

He places a hand on the documents and pulls them closer to read them over.

Fujieda starts eating his food, then, before it gets even colder.

Towa scans the documents quickly then looks back up at Fujieda. "Okay."

"And there's the matter of your name. I know we talked about it before but you don't have to—"

"Fujieda."

?

"Towa. Fujieda Towa."

"You... really?"

"Yeah. Nothing to think about." He pushes the documents back over to Fujieda and takes a drag of his cig, all the way to the filter this time, then he presses its tip against the bottom of the ashtray and reaches into a pocket for another.

"It'll be really hard to change it later if you want to—"

"But I'll get to start calling you Ryō. And we'll be married."

!

"Y-you could've been calling me Ryō already... we've... I mean..."

Shrug. "Didn't feel right. Will take some getting used to."

"And, that would not, I mean I'm not saying, this isn't—"

"Is that what it takes to fluster you? I'm aware that none of these documents were marriage ones, you don't need to tell me."

"I—we've been together for, it hasn't really been that long—"

"And yet you were the one who had originally suggested that I use your name."

"Yes but I hadn't really though—you didn't want Takasato nor Sakuragi nor Murase—"

He twitches a bit at "Sakuragi" but gets over it quickly. "So are you saying you don't want to marry me?"

"I, no, that's not what I'm saying at all. I'm." He looks down at his trembling hands, interlaces his fingers together so he'll stop trembling, then looks back up at Towa. "Are you sure?"

"Yeah."

"Then. Yes. I'll marry you, Towa."

"Guess you have one more document to fetch for us."

"...but we should wait until Dr. Murase is out of prison."

?

"Wouldn't you want him to attend our wedding?"

"...I never said anything about a wedding."

"But I did."

"...tch. Such a hassle. You're dealing with it, I don't want any part of it."

"Are you not even going to pick your dress?"

"You think you're the only one here who can get under other people's skin?"

"You're getting cocky," says Towa, before slowly placing his cigarette on the ashtray, pushing the plates to the side, and climbing almost all the way over the table to kiss Fuj- Ryō.

!!!!

He instinctively leans into the kiss but then stops and pushes Towa away. "We're in public!"

"You didn't have a problem with that outside."

"That was—different."

"Oh? Was it because that didn't give you a hard-on?" he asks, sweetly, and starts to reach down in the direction of Ryō's crotch.

Ryō grabs Towa's wrist before it can reach its destination. "Towa!"

"Take me home and fuck me properly, then."

"I don't have time—"

"Surely you can make some time for your fiancé?"

That word renders him speechless.

Towa leans forward again to kiss Ryō, but this time he's soft and sweet about it, almost teasing.

He can't help but respond, again, and lean into it...

No. He pulls back. "Damnit, Towa," he curses before pushing Towa back onto his seat, reaching into his pocket to grab his wallet, dropping a lot more money than the meal actually cost on the table, and grabbing Towa's arm to drag him away.

Maybe he can't get everything he wants but he can definitely get at least some things.

They don't make it to their house. Towa spent the first ten minutes of their walk teasing Ryō and fondling him discreetly and eventually he couldn't take it anymore and just pulled Towa into a dark alley and started making out with him right then and there.

For all that Fuji- Ryō claimed that he wasn't into using Towa like a sex toy and discarding him afterwards, when he got going he could get surprisingly rough. Still nowhere near as much as Towa's old partners, but it combines nicely with the way his body already hurting from the cuts and the earlier scuffle. And it really was just a scuffle; it used to be hard to find someone willing to beat him unconscious, now it's downright impossible. Towa still wishes Ryō would at least take advantage of his bruises, but no dice. He's being extra careful about them.

"Fuck me," Towa breathes in between gasps, humping Ryō's leg as he's being pressed against a wall. "I want you in me."

"Not here—"

Towa places his hands on either side of Ryō's face, looks deep in his eyes, and says, "I love you."