Hanna kept looking at the clock; even as he smiled hugely over his giant mug of hot chocolate, and kicked his feet from the tall stool that left him with a few good inches between his shoes and the ground, and scribbled on a children's menu with Veser with the broken blue crayon, he glanced up at the clock hanging above the order window again.
"He'll be here soon," Toni told him kindly, and when he grinned at her, Toni's smile back was like a knee-jerk reaction.
"Ohh, I know, but our umbrella got eaten last week, and Jensen hates getting wet! That's why I made him stay home this time, but I think he was totally bummed about it. Urgghh what if it starts pouring again?"
The detective flicked another look at the clock, then twisted in his seat to look out the window.
They were all clustered in a booth at IHOP at roughly five o'clock in the morning, a little dirty and roughed up and somewhat damp from their scuffle with a banshee living in someone's shed. Hanna had called his partner as soon as they were done, as he'd promised to; laughing as the client accosted Veser somewhat hysterically for answers, as Toni rushed over to play peacemaker and Conrad bemoaned his sweater, and shading his face to look up at the sky through the rain at the same time he held his phone to his ear.
"Hey Felix! All done! Haha, not a scratch- you worry too much! So but hey, I think the rain's gonna stop- wanna meet us at IHOP in an hour?"
"We haven't been here for an hour yet," Conrad said, and scowled without heat at Hanna's subsequent pout. "What are you, five?"
The bell above the door got their attention, and Hanna's 100 kilowatt eyes lit up the whole restaurant when he spun around to find the zombie already making his way to their table.
"Darcy! You're here!" He jumped down from his seat to greet the dead man properly with a thoroughly suffocating hug. As he pulled back, grinning ear to ear, something occurred to him that dimmed the smile by about two-thirds. "Oh, wow, now that I think about it how dumb am I? You don't eat, jeez, we totally should have just met up at the office, you just walked all the way here for literally nothing."
Gloved fingers pushed through his red curls, orange headlight eyes intent on Hanna's pale face, like he had to commit every line and contour to memory with only a moment to do so; and their friends pretended to be busy with menus as Darcy said, "Not nothing."
But they couldn't pretend not hear the delighted little "gnee" noise Hanna made, and traded secret smiles with each other while the two investigators caught each other up on the four hours they'd spent apart, wrapped up in their own world; similarly, Darcy unwound his scarf halfway and wrapped the trailing edges around Hanna's neck, too, probably just so everyone was clear.
As if they weren't already.
With Hanna giggling, and his zombie smiling in that barely-there-but-definitely-there kind of way, Veser drained his Mountain Dew in one go and asked, mostly rhetorically, "Are we even here to eat?"
"Probably just to rendezvous the lovebirds," Conrad muttered, pushing his decoy coffee in circles.
"I will fight whichever one of you ruins this moment," Toni said sweetly, and, in one part legitimate fear and three parts actual respect for the desperately lonely and relentlessly kind redhead who'd adopted them all {currently blushing and beaming and the only thing in the whole room as far as those glowing honey gold eyes were concerned} neither of them did.