A/N: Written for the Level Infinity Challenge, Tutorial 3 – write a fic that is exactly 333 words.
Token Gifts for Yamaki
Yamaki was used to getting little token gifts. It came with being a worker in a workplace, and most of them quickly found new homes. Largely because they weren't quite right – the wrong brand of cigarettes or a lighter that clashed with a certain tie…or he'd find some other excuse to pass them along and forget who'd even given them. New Years, birthdays, promotions and transfers… and then he came to Hypnos and that system was neatly bundled up and tossed out the window.
He could have blamed a good portion of that on Reika. After all, having your girlfriend move in (or having a girlfriend, period) tended to change one's perspectives. And in this case that meant writing little cards or emails of thanks. And keeping the present – but it was a small mercy that Hypnos' staff knew him better than people at his previous jobs because most the usual excuses were debunked right off the bat. It was really on a matter of principle that he wanted to send them off to new homes. An idea Reika was quick to squash when she pointed out he had no honest reason for not making use of them.
So he wore the cuff links Megumi got for him to work one day, and replaced his old lighter (which was pretty much out of fuel anyway) with the one with a dolphin design from Rob McCoy (okay, he wasn't technically a part of Hypnos but they had teamed up before the whole D-Reaper incident…) and he had a fancy pen from a set the Lees had given him in his pocket. And he ate the cream puff Culumon offered and the Guilmon bread Takato and Guilmon offered and accepted a plain white but good quality handkerchief Renamon and Ruki offered and thought he was getting an awful lot of token gifts from people who weren't technically a part of Hypnos as well. But so close after the D-reaper incident, it couldn't really be helped.